lundi, 16 octobre 2017

Unintended Consequences: How the Left Keeps Helping Us

Everything is going exactly according to plan. This is what super-villains always say, usually just before their plans are upset. (“Seize him, you fools! He’s getting away!”) So, I am may be tempting fate by saying such a thing, but actually I don’t think so. As of late it really does seem like something — Providence, the Invisible Hand, the Cunning of Reason, or what have you — has been at work behind the scenes, helping our cause. In truth, we don’t have a plan, but events are unfolding as if someone does, and as if that someone is smiling upon us (perhaps from atop his perch in Asgard).

None of this should be particularly surprising. After all, we have the truth on our side. And the truth is reality. No individual and no civilization can exist for long in revolt against reality. Reality always finds a way to thwart our denial and our delusions, and to call attention to itself over and over again — until finally we are compelled to listen. Aristotle said that “truth seems to be like the proverbial door, which no one can fail to hit.” Actually, truth is like the proverbial Mack truck which cannot fail to hit us, if we try denying it for very long.

Now, an important part of how this Providence/Cunning of Reason stuff works is that if there is a truth that needs to come out, or a major societal shift that needs to take place, whatever human actors do will tend to advance this. In other words, once we reach a certain set of conditions where the denial of truth is no longer viable, and the truth is just aching to get out, even those who oppose this process will wind up helping it along. Their actions, in short, have unintended consequences. We now see this playing out in a big way in how the Left is conducting itself, especially in its attempts to oppose us. Some of the ways this is happening are obvious, and have been commented on before; others are not so obvious.

The Left thinks it has scored some recent victories by “infiltrating” our private gatherings and reporting on them. This includes the London Forum and the Counter-Currents-sponsored Northwest Forum. As Greg Johnson has already pointed out, all these infiltrators succeeded in doing was proving that we say the same things in private that we do in public. (The claims of Leftists that we’ve been “exposed” are therefore especially comical.) Aside from this, what we are quoted as saying will probably attract more people than it will repulse. Of course, Leftists are constitutionally incapable of perceiving this. They think that our ideas are so self-evidently evil all they have to do is lay them bare. But to almost everyone who isn’t a committed Left-wing ideologue, at least some of our ideas seem . . . well . . . true.

For example, Greg Johnson was secretly recorded at the London Forum quoting someone saying that “while the survivors [of the Manchester Islamic terrorist attack] were still picking bloody bits of children from their hair, Britain’s leaders were rushing toward the nearest camera to profess their undying commitment to diversity.” This is actually an extraordinarily powerful observation, which would stir many people at least to say “you know, he’s got a point.” But, of course, Leftists cannot see this: they broadcast the comment to all the world, thinking it would be summarily rejected by all right-thinking people. Umm, not quite. Thank you, Leftists! If you had but one face I would kiss it (and then get a shot of penicillin).

But this infiltration has the potential to birth an even more important, and less obvious, unintended consequence (and this one is real Cunning of Reason stuff). After the infiltration of the Northwest Forum, the organizers have now decided to make these events public. Our movement already has annual or semi-annual conferences, such as AmRen and NPI. However, the vast majority of events are private, invitation-only affairs which rely on secrecy: vetting (sometimes none-too-successful-vetting, it seems), announcing the location at the last minute, etc. These infiltrations teach us that the way forward may be to end this practice, and make many of our events open to the public. This would make us more visible — more of a regular part of the social and political landscape.

The unintended consequence of Leftist infiltration would therefore be one that Leftists desperately want to avoid: our “normalization.” Publicly-held, New Right events would simply become a “regular thing.” Going (more) public would also require many participants in our events to face a tough choice. They would have to ask themselves whether they are willing to take the risk of being seen at a public event, or forgo attending altogether. More and more of our hitherto reclusive comrades, I believe, have reached a point where they are willing to say “fuck it” and show up anyway, regardless of the consequences. And as more of these public events begin popping up, and more people show up (if only out of curiosity) it will be harder and harder to penalize attendees in some fashion or other. Again, thanks Leftists.

To cite one specific case, Greg Johnson has hitherto been famously camera shy, due to his desire to follow the advice of Socrates and maintain as much as possible “a private life.” But Greg’s recent video exposure has forced him to confront the fact that maintaining a private life is now pretty much a lost cause — the Left (as well as some douchebags on “our side”) won’t allow it. And that’s very good for us. Greg has the best mind in the American New Right scene. Abandoning his former reclusiveness means that we will be seeing more of him: more public lectures and conference appearances, and possibly YouTube videos. Ironically, in “exposing” Greg the Left has . . . well . . . increased his exposure; it has freed him (or perhaps I should say “unleashed” him). This isn’t what the Left wanted — but, again, ideology has made them too stupid to see that they are cooperating in undermining themselves.

Then there are the growing number of “hit pieces” that have been published in recent months, targeting prominent members of our movement. These are stuffed to the gills with unintended consequences. As everyone knows by now, Mike Enoch was the subject of a recent exposé in The New Yorker. One gets the impression that the author probably tried hard to make Mike look bad — but, predictably, the article has the unintended consequence, to any unbiased reader, of making him look like rather a swell fellow. As one of my (very objective) correspondents put it: “One gets the impression that Enoch really is seeking for truth. There are also details like him taking care of his handicapped mischling brother, that make him look rather nice and caring. Also, he does not say anything bad about his (I assume soon-to-be-ex)-wife, which is usually the case with any divorce. In fact, his attachment to her comes through strongly. The overall picture is rather complex and a far cry from the usual villain caricatures.”

An even better example of the unintended consequences of Leftist exposés is the profile of the German Götz Kubitschek which appeared just before the Enoch piece in The New York Times. This is, without question, the most fair and objective article I think I have ever seen on a Right-wing figure. But I suspect that the (presumably Left-wing) reporter simply allows Kubitschek to speak for himself because he thinks that, again, our ideas are so self-evidently evil all one need do is report them accurately. This backfires in a very, very big way. Not only does Herr Kubitschek seem sweetly reasonable, we learn that he has seven children and a farm full of lovingly-tended goats and bunny rabbits. At one point, he absents himself from the interview to go and heal an ailing baby goat. The only way this could have been better for us is if Kubitschek had been depicted curing lepers or miracling bread into existence. Once again, the Left takes careful aim at its own foot and opens fire.

Götz Kubitschek milks goat

Mention must also be made of the Left’s attempts to censor us, de-platform us, ruin our lives and careers, etc. (I have already written an essay about how to deal with these dangers on a day-to-day basis.) Every time this happens — if it gets some exposure — the Left comes off looking more and more desperate, hateful, and intolerant. A reversal is taking place very, very quickly: the Left is positioning itself as the defensive, tyrannical Establishment, and simultaneously positioning us as the rebels, the true “liberal” advocates of freedom of thought, and as the new counter-culture. Thanks! Sensible, average people cannot help but see the hateful, censorious behavior of the Left as the last gasp of a dying ideology. In other words, at some level of their awareness they see this behavior and think “What’s wrong with these people? What are they trying to hide? What are they trying to compensate for?” This is not the behavior of people confident in the truth of their views — it is the behavior of cornered rats; of criminal types who know the jig is up; of moochers who’ve realized the free lunch is over with.

Needless to say, this also applies to the violence of the Left, especially when it is perpetrated by Antifa and Black Lives Matter. Decent, average folks deeply disapprove of lawlessness, and of violence used as a tool of oppression, especially when it is directed at the underdog (this is very deeply set in the American character). Thus, Trump very wisely appealed, as did Nixon in 1968, to “law and order.” This is very probably a major part of why he won. Since the election, of course, the Left has continued to oblige us by amping up the violence. In general, as has been pointed out by many, the general bat-shit-crazy antics of the Left since the election of Donald Trump have only been helping us. More and more people are fed up with Leftism, and getting more bold about saying so.

And we must add to this the fact that, in addition to violence and mischief of all sorts, the Left seems completely clueless about the fact that Americans in vast numbers have repudiated their policies — every one of which has been a disaster for the country, and for the electoral prospects of liberals. Just the other day the liberal-controlled Boy Scouts of America announced that it will accept girls, presumably including girls who think they are boys. But this is just an extension of the “gender madness” that seriously harmed Democrats in the last election. Now California seems poised to pass a law criminalizing the use of the wrong pronouns when dealing with “transgender” people (while simultaneously making it no longer a felony to deliberately infect someone with HIV).

It’s really like Leftists just can’t help themselves. And, indeed, they can’t. They are committed to a life-denying morality that, taken to its logical conclusion, destroys families, communities, and all the basic institutions of civilization. That includes liberal families, communities, and institutions. And the moral fanaticism of the Left requires them to carry their ideas to their logical conclusion — to the extreme. What we are seeing is the Left beginning to eat itself, in a dialectic that spells their doom. The Left cannot abandon the ideology in which it has invested so much — the ideology through which its overly-socialized adherents find their self-worth; the ideology through which its base of slave-types and defective oddballs seeks to revenge itself upon the strong and the healthy. The Left will only continue to double-down and become more insane, more extreme. And the result will be that it will destroy itself, and probably quicker than any of us think. It seems right on course to do this, and the signs are everywhere. We can help this along through our activities, but really the Left is doing all the heavy lifting for us.

Three cheers for unintended consequences!

This just in: An appearance by Martin Sellner and Martin Lichtmesz at the Frankfurt Book Fair made international news when they were accosted by Antifa. Result: 3,000 copies of Lichtmesz’s new book have sold! Thank you again, Leftists. We owe you so much!

Following the election of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth President of the United States, there was a flood of YouTube clips of Clinton supporters, mostly female, throwing tantrums of biblical proportions (the reader will know the sort of thing: he rent his garmentsand covered himself with sackcloth, etc.) which afforded this writer both amusement and bewilderment. The tearful outbursts of grief were without insight or intelligence of any kind, with one exception.

The exception was a young lady who, after assuring her viewers that she had “stopped crying about it,” turned her wrath on Hillary Clinton. Hillary, it seemed, had enabled “a fascist” to become President, and thereafter unfolded an attack on Clinton from one of the disappointed YouTube amazons, the first of its kind which indicated that a functioning human mind was at work. “We told you,” the lady wailed, “we warned you” (who she meant by “we” was unclear – Bernie supporters, perhaps?) “but you would not listen. We told you: don’t ignore the working man. Don’t ignore the rust belt . . . Hillary Clinton, we overlooked a lot, we overlooked the corruption, we overlooked your links to Goldman Sachs. We warned you. Hilary Clinton, oh, we kept warning you and you wouldn’t listen. You were so sure, so damn arrogant. I’m through with you. You ignored the working man. You ignored the rust belt. Now we’ve got this and it’s your fault! It’s your fault!” Amidst the wailing and petulance, this Clinton voter had made a telling point. Donald Trump won because he had not ignored the rust belt, and his opponent had.

The two seismic upsets of 2016, Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, confounding both polls and media expectations, would not have come about without the common man, the rust belt, the blue-collar worker, Joe Sixpack, slipping harness and voting with “the Right.” Those who had faithfully and reliably followed the Democrat/Labour parties through one election after another, as their parents had done, and in many cases their parents’ parents, voted in opposition to the way the urban professional class voted. These events highlighted the distance between the wealthy liberal elites deciding what constituted progressive and liberal politics, and the political priorities of the indigenous low-paid classes.

The gulf between wealthy urban liberals and an ignored, socially conservative working class is the focus of a new and impassioned political essay by the French sociologist Jean-Claude Michéa called Notre Ennemi, le Capital (Our Enemy: Capital). Jean-Claude Michéa is a socialist, but his analysis of recent events is far from that of the establishment Left-wing’s alarm at the “worrying rise of populism.” His critique of the Left – he does not call himself a Left-winger and indeed makes a critical distinction between Left-wing and socialist – is the hardest a socialist could make, namely that it has abandoned a realistic or meaningful critique of capitalism. “The modern Left,” Michéa claims, “has abandoned any kind of coherent critique of capital.”

The title of Michéa’s book might arguably be Our Enemy: Liberalism, since it is against the liberalism of the affluent that his ire is directed. The word liberal has slightly different connotations in France and the Anglophone world. In France, liberalism is primarily the ideology of faith in free markets with minimal state interference, “those who lose deserve to lose, those who win deserve to win”; and secondly, the expression of an ideology of individual freedom from social constraint. Michéa distinguishes two radically different trends at the heart of socialist/emancipatory movements in history. “In fact, socialism and the Left draw on, and have done from their very beginnings, two logically distinct narratives which only in part overlap.” (p. 47) Put simply, one is the doctrine which seeks the emancipation of the working class, that is to say, the de-alienation of all who work in society, a society organized from the bottom up and based in the organic community, while the other is the Left-wing notion of progress, the ongoing struggle to free individuals from social restraint or responsibility, for minority rights and abstract issues in the name of progress, a demand from the top down. This latter kind of progressive politics, according to Michéa, is not only not opposed to global capitalism, it undermines the very kind of social solidarity which should be expected to oppose global capitalist growth.

Michéa understands the liberal element of parties of progress as being fundamentally anti-democratic, echoing here the distinction made by the French thinker, Alain de Benoist, between democracy and liberalism. Liberalism, obsessed with minorities and what another socialist, George Galloway, famously mocked as “liberal hothouse” issues, is not in principle opposed to the centralization of economic power at all, according to Michéa. Quite the contrary. It is, however, opposed to democracy, that is to say to any entitlement giving a role in the allocation of power to the majority of the people and of any entitlement to a nation to decide its own destiny. In short, liberalism extends economic sovereignty at the expense of political sovereignty.

Michéa’s argument is given credence by the actions of the leaders of the European Union, who are as enthusiastic about deregulating trade as they are unenthusiastic about allowing popular democratic decisions to be made about trade. Liberalism, according to Michéa, is a belief system operating in the cause of capital which supports a minority to oppress a majority. He notes that the very authoritarian and viscerally anti-socialist General Pinochet in Chile pursued an extremely liberal economic policy based on the free market ideas of Friedrich Hayek, who did not much care about democratic liberties so long as rulers got the economy right and followed the economic precepts of Milton Friedman, whose pupils were advisers to the government. Michéa quotes Jean-Claude Juncker (from Le Figaro, January 29, 2015) as stating that “there could be no democratic choice against the European treaties.”

The stream of venom from the rich kids of Britain which erupted, and has not ceased, since June 23, 2016 (the day the EU referendum result was announced) is another casebook example of the liberal loathing of democracy. Liberal outrage is directed at the very notion that major political or economic decisions should be made by a majority of the people, instead of by a minority of wealthy experts, in the first place. A piece that is exemplary in its anti-democratic virulence was penned by the author Julian Barnes and published in the London Review of Books (“People Will Hate Us Again[4]“) in the aftermath of the referendum result in which he described how he and his affluent London dinner-party friends discussed whom they despised most among those who were responsible for the result. (Nearly all remainers were against having a referendum at all.) Barnes’ choice alighted on Nigel Farage. Here is a taste of Julian Barnes:

Farage . . . had been poisoning the well for years, with his fake man-in-pub chaff, his white paranoia and low-to-mid-level racism (isn’t it hard to hear English spoken on a train nowadays?). But of course Nigel can’t really be a racist, can he, because he’s got a German wife? (Except that she’s now chucked him out for the Usual Reasons.) Without Farage’s covert and overt endorsement, the smothered bonfire of xenophobia would not have burst into open flame on 23 June.

That novels like this have sprouted everywhere like mushrooms in recent decades is expressive of a particular socio-political condition. The persistence of a world capitalist system that prioritizes individual profit over collective need goes side by side with the elevation of a hedonistic bourgeois writer to the pedestal as the bearer of individual creativity and artistic beauty.

Interestingly, Jean-Claude Michéa picks out the very same French writer, Gustave Flaubert, as an example of an early liberal’s obsession with minorities (in Flaubert’s case, with gypsies) – a love of minority rights accompanied by disdain for collective identities and aspirations as well as the working classes. Then and now, the liberal does not greatly care for your average Joe, at least not if Joe’s face is white. As Aymeric Patricot wrote in Les Petits Blancs (Little Whites), “They are too poor to interest the Right and too white to interest the Left.”

Michéa appeals to the notion highlighted by George Orwell (whom he greatly admires) of common decency, morality, and social responsibility. But liberalism, notes Michéa, has become the philosophy of skepticism and generalized deconstruction. There is all the difference in the world between a socialism of ordinary folk and a socialism of intellectuals, the latter being nothing more than a championing of causes by a deconstructivist elite. Liberalism is the philosophy of “indifferentiation anchored in the movement of the uniformity of the market” (p. 133). It is a central thesis of the book that liberalism creates individuation in human societies so that the individual is increasingly isolated and social cohesion declines, while paradoxically and running parallel to this development, the economic structures of the world become increasingly uniform, dominated by the power of capital and concentrated in the hands of an increasingly wealthy few.

Michéa stresses that liberalism then becomes obsessed by phobias. A “phobia,” once coined by the National Socialists in occupied Europe to describe the members of the French and Serb resistance movements, he notes wryly, has been recently reappropriated, presumably unknowingly, by opponents of Brexit to describe Brexiters, namely: “europhobe.” Michéa gives a sad but well-known example of the stultifying effects of the “phobia” label: the Rotherham scandal, which erupted in 2014 after the publication of the Jay Report. The report revealed that, from 1997 to 2013, over a thousand girls between ages 11 and 16 had been kidnapped or inveigled by Pakistani gangs to go with them, who were then abused, drugged, plied with alcohol, raped, and in some cases even tortured and forced into prostitution. The town council did nothing about it for over a decade, in spite of being informed about the situation, out of fear of being found guilty of one of the liberal phobias (in this case, “Islamophobia”). For Michéa, this is an example of “common decency” being sacrificed to a liberal prejudice. The protection of the young was seen as less important than risking the allegation of “Islamophobia.” Michéa then quotes Jean-Louis Harouel: the rights of man took precedence over the rights of people.

It is the often-concealed reality of the power of capital which constitutes the fraud of liberal progressive politics, for liberalism as an ideology is increasingly understood as an ideology of the well-to-do. The notion of social justice has shifted from the belief in fair pay and fair opportunities towards hothouse issues which serve to undermine social solidarity. So it is that feminists at the BBC are more concerned about equality of pay between high-earning male and female media executives than a fairer deal for the poor, whether male or female, in society as a whole. This feminist focus on highly-paid women was also evident in Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The Democratic Party seemed more concerned that women in top jobs should receive the same pay as men in comparable jobs than in wishing in any way to close the gap between America’s wealthy and poor. For poor Democrat families living on $1,500 a month, the “glass ceiling’” debate and the “solidarity of sisters” must have seemed very remote from their daily concerns.

For Michéa, all this is no coincidence, since progressive politics, as he sees it, has become a contributory force to the intensification of the power of capital and a vehicle of social disintegration, serving to reinforce the ever-greater concentration of capital in the hands of the few. All prejudices are combated except one: the prejudice of fiscal power. That is to say, nobody should face any barrier other than the barrier of money; and nobody should be excluded from any club, from buying any house, from doing anything he or she wants to do, so long as they have the financial means to do it. If they do not have the financial means to join the club, then their entitlement is withdrawn. Money is everything.

Michéa, like Marx, believes that development by internationalist capitalism acts as a centrifuge to separate the two extremes of those who possess capital from those who do not. Modern society offers increasingly fewer loyalties other than loyalty to the principle of individual competition in a free market. This is why all group adhesion and group loyalty, whether ethnic or geographic or of social class, is undermined or openly attacked by the proponents of progress. In the tradition of socialist conservatives going back to George Orwell, Michéa sees the simplification of language, the dumbing-down of society, and the failure of modern education as part of a pattern.

An example of this centrifugal tendency as practiced by the European Union is the new guidelines issued by the Central European Bank to national banks, which state that mortgage loans should only be granted to those who can prove that they will be able to service the debt in its entirety within the span of their working life. This astonishing provision, which has received little publicity, is purportedly a measure to prevent a repetition of the American mortgage crisis of 2008, but if Michéa is correct, it is more likely a measure aimed at depriving the working and middle classes of the opportunity to become property owners. It will effectively accelerate the widely-noted tendency in Europe to reduce the power of the middle class, which is being driven upwards or downwards towards the minority of haves or the majority of have-nots. It used to be a Marxist axiom that the middle classes would turn to fascism if deprived of their livelihoods by capitalism, as an alternative to joining the ranks of the dispossessed. Michéa does not directly reiterate this Marxist analysis but he certainly implies it; he has obviously read Marx, and if he is not a Marxist (he leans more toward the writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the anarchist/socialist critic of Marx), he certainly owes a debt to the social-psychological analyses of the author of Das Kapital.

The capitalist system, to which even the Right-wing critiques of immigration are wed, necessarily strives towards growth, profit, greater efficiency, and expanding markets. All this means an ever-increasing globalization of business. There is an underlying contradiction between on the one hand an appeal to a conservative electorate fearful of job losses and distrustful of immigration, and a pursuit of growth and free trade to maximize profits on the other. Michéa identifies, rightly I believe, mass immigration as a phenomenon backed by the capitalist ruling order to ensure that full employment is never achieved, for the fear of unemployment is the best way to keep wages down. In this respect, pro-immigration anti-fascists act as security guards for high finance, terrorizing any opposition to cheap labor immigration. The contradiction between an appeal to job security and internationalization of capital and free financial markets underlies the promise to impose trade barriers and build walls while at the same time vigorously pursuing and furthering the cause of global trade and financial interdependence.

The liberalization and privatization which became fashionable in the 1980s was a response by the state to the collapse of Soviet Communism and a reaction against Keynesian solutions to stagnation and economic inertia. Michéa favors neither big government of the traditional socialist kind nor a free-market system caught, as he sees it, in a contradiction between a conservative wish to halt the free flow of individuals and its encouragement of the free flow of finance. Instead, Michéa argues for a third kind of social and economic order, one which eschews the centralization and economic top-down principles of Fordism and Leninism on the one hand and the liberal atomization of society as envisaged by progressives on the other. For Michéa, both are alienating and both destroy human communities in service to growth and the concentration of power in a political and economic center. Such centralist notions of ordering society are characterized even in post-war architecture: Michéa cites here the example of the ill-famed Pruitt-Igoe apartment complex[6], demolished in 1976, which was a monument to collectivist folly and liberal “good intentions,” and which can be summed up in the expression of all experts, in this case architectural and engineering experts: “Trust us, we know what’s best for you.”

All abstract revolutionary doctrine, whether economic or political, warns Michéa, sacrifices the people to its power-seeking goals, whether Taylorist (revolutionizing the means of production to maximum efficiency) or Leninist (revolutionizing the control of the means of production to the point of absolute central control). Michéa finishes with a dire warning that what he calls “Silicon Valley liberalism” is the new face of an old ideology whose ideals are growth and progress in a world which cannot bear much more of either, and whose victims are the great mass of human beings, whose natural ethnic, geographical, and social attachments are being destroyed by humanity’s great enemy, capital. This is what Michéa has to say about the condescending pose of modern advanced and affluent liberal thinkers:

For a growing number of people of modest means, whose daily life is hell, the words “Left-wing” mean, if they mean anything at all, at best a defense of public sector workers (which they realize is a protected corral, albeit they may have an idealized view of public employees’ working conditions), and at worst, “Left-wing” means to them the self-justification of journalists, intellectuals, and show-business stars whose imperturbable and permanently patronizing tone has become literally intolerable. (p. 300) (Emphasis Michéa’s)

So now we are back where I started. Clinton ignored the rust belt and Donald Trump won the election. But now Donald Trump seems to be more interested in what he is most skilled at: accumulating capital. Brexit spokesmen seem to be more concerned with proving that Britain’s exit from the EU will open the way for more international trade than stressing that it provides the nation with the ability to close its borders and create a fairer society.

The liberal global model is one model of society, proposed to us today by the champions of globalism and growth; the society where, as John Rawls approvingly put it, individuals can exist side by side with each other while being mutually indifferent. Michéa asks, what is the second element within socialism, distinct from liberal notions of progress and growth, that is a model of society which is socialist but not global, not top-down? It is the socialism of the living indigenous community, of those who, as he puts it, “feel solidarity from the very beginning,” and socialism will be the rebirth, in superior form, of an archaic social type. The choice, in other words, is between a true community of kindred spirits and the barbarism of global centralized power, whose aim is to reduce human society to a mass of hapless individuals easily divided and oppressed.

dimanche, 29 janvier 2017

UNDERSTANDING THE LEFT'S WEAPONIZATION OF CATEGORIES

The greatest humiliations are to be outwitted by morons and shamed by scumbags, but that is exactly what keeps on happening to Conservatives whenever they run into the Left.

Based on what they espouse, the Left are clearly the lowest of the low. They freely believe in any number of ostensibly absurd and immoral ideas, but they nevertheless manage to run rings round their Conservative opponents, using a formula that should be relatively easy to understand and counter, but which Conservatives fail to do.

The way that the Left gulls Conservatives is as follows. They take two categories that are central to human identity, and which were formerly taken for granted, namely gender and race, and apply them to the social, moral, and cultural realms.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this, but it requires a lot of complexity and subtlety, and calls for a case-by-case analytical approach using data and context. But, instead of doing that, the Left takes advantage of the fact that most people experience these categories on the individual level as identitarian absolutes. This allows the Left to give them a simple on/off moral character, a process that is facilitated by invoking the negative/positive dichotomy and turning them into simple moral negatives. The process is complete when the "-ist" suffix is added, marking them as somehow "sinister."

This is how the Left distorts things. Race and sex—extended from the individual to the social, moral, and cultural levels—should be categories of multifarious interpretation but the Left magically transforms them into crude moral simplicites with a prepackaged verdict. Categories that could have been applied productively to a wide range of issues, are thus reduced to mere "racism" and "sexism"—fixed, over-emotionalized states that either exist or don't in the same way that murder or pregnancy is or isn't.

But, even in its negative form, as a weaponized tool of the Left, Racism, given its polymorphous application, continually resists its oversimplification as a crude moral tool. It has many degrees that range from extremely harmful ethnomasochism all the way through to psychopathic and self-harming hatred of the Other, via a number of beneficial and even mutually beneficial states in between. This is something that the Left has to work constantly to stop us seeing.

The various degrees of Racism and Sexism can be likened to the three bowls of porridge in the children's story "Goldilocks and the Three Bears": One is too hot, one too cold, and one just right. What the Left has done however is to convince "Goldilocks" that all the bowls of porridge are scalding hot, and thus scared her away from ever going anywhere near porridge. In the same way, the Left manages to convince Conservatives that racism and sexism are "always too hot," even when there are clearly examples of them being "just right."

From a debate over whether something is harmful or beneficial in a specific situation, or about what groups benefit and to what degree, we have moved into an inquisition and an assertion of evil. In short, a medievalist approach has prevailed. This suits the regressive nature of the Left.

When the Left decides to attack something, you will often see stories that start with headlines or intros asking the question whether such-and-such a thing/person is "racist" or "sexist," or, if the Left is soft-peddling for some reason, "symbolic of our racist/sexist past," etc.

This simplification and weaponization of categories gives the Left an enormous advantage over their opponents, because, almost everything human touches on gender or race in some way, and involves inequalities. Thus anything can be spun as "racist" or "sexist"—and therefore deeply negative—in order to suit whatever agenda the Left wishes to run with that day.

Once the Left is able to point to something that indicates any kind of inequality of outcome and connect it to race or gender, it is essentially game over. Conservatives have little option but to pack their knapsacks and resume their endless trudge backwards.

The way that this can be fought is to simply reject the Left's relentless imposition of moral simplicity and absolutism on categories that are complex, contextual, and gradated, and which include beneficial as well as detrimental aspects.

To defeat the Left we must recognize that there are in fact good forms of "racism" and "sexism," as well as bad ones, plus many gradations, none of them necessarily evil. The goal of political and philosophical debate should then be to identify where the good lies and which groups benefit and to what degree, and to slot this into a framework of the greater good.

jeudi, 02 juin 2016

On the 28th-29th May in the German city of Magdeburg, the party congress of the German “Left Party” (die Linke) was held. Representatives of one of the largest German opposition parties elected the leadership and discussed plans for the development of the party in the period before the parliamentary elections to be held in 2017. As was expected, the party leadership was re-elected. Katja Kipping and Bernd Riexinger were re-elected as co-chairs of the party. However, the latest events showed that they could not manage the challenges of last year, as the popularity of the party dropped significantly in its stronghold – Eastern Germany. The congress also highlighted the internal split within the party caused by its stance on migrants and the possibility of a broader coalition with other left-wing parties.

The Left Party as a political phenomenon

The "Left Party" was formed originally from the Social Democratic Party of Germany and representatives of the popular in East Germany Party of Democratic Socialism - the successor to the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, the ruling party of the GDR. In the last election in 2013, the party won 8.6% of the vote, thus taking 64 out of 630 seats in the Bundestag.

From the outset, the party united rather disparate forces: the old left, raised in Marxist-Leninist spirit in East Germany, the "reformed" East German left (the most typical example - Gregor Gysi), "New Left" and the radical left in West Germany, and the Electoral Alternative for Labour and Social Justice (WASG), a party largely consisting of dissident Social Democrats, trade union members, headed (not officially) by Oskar Lafontaine, former German Minister of Finance in 1998-1999. Lafontaine, German sovereigntist and a fan of Friedrich List, who also positioned himself against the country to attract foreign labor because it harmed the interests of the German workers, seriously endorsed the Party from an electoral point of view. However, this has caused the "Left Party" to be criticized by the left-wing radicals and those for whom there was no principled defense of the interests of the German working class but the protection of minority interests and the attraction of migrants.

Refugee crisis and its aftermath

In 2015, the refugee crisis in Germany brought the old differences to the fore. Lafontaine’s spouse and head of the parliamentary faction of the Left Party in the Bundestag Sarah Wagenknecht cautiously opposed the policy of an unlimited acceptance of migrants. After the New Year's Eve sexual assaults in Cologne in January, Wagenknecht declared, "Whoever abuses their guest's rights has also forfeited their guest's rights." In March she gave an interview to the "Berliner Kurier", where she modestly dared to say, "Not all refugees can come". "We cannot take one million or more refugees each year," she said. That was enough to ensure that the representatives of the radical left within the party started to harshly criticize Wagenknecht. And at the party conference in Magdeburg, radical left "anti-fascists" were distinguished by the fact that they even threw a cake at her. They had earlier made the same boorish act in relation to a female MEP from right party "Alternative for Germany” Beatrix von Storch.

The migration crisis and the slurred position of the party on migrants (leadership has tried to dissociate itself from the statements of Sarah Wagenknecht) dealt a serious blow to the positions of the party in East Germany. Thus, according to recent opinion polls, the Christian Democratic Party (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party - the Christian Social Union - polled at 30.5%, and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) had 19.5%. Third place was claimed by the party of eurosceptics "Alternative for Germany", which is supported by 15% of Germans. "Green" received only 13%, and the "Left Party" - only 10%. The leadership of the Left Party recognizes that "Alternative for Germany" took their part of the electorate. Former left party parliamentary leader Gregor Gysi, in a recent interview for RND network, declared that he was "shocked that the poor, disenfranchised workers are voting, we're no longer the protest party in the East - more in the West ", he said. AfD took the position of the largest opposition party of East Germany. The reason for the outflow of the "Left" electorate is clear – the pro-migrant position of the party’s leadership - but instead, to correct their previous mistakes, it is ready to turn the party into an instrument of political intrigues, whose main goal is to isolate the increasingly popular "Alternative for Germany."

Anti-AfD strategy

The Left Party's organ - Neues Deutschland - started a campaign for promotion of forming leftist coalition with SPD and Greens against the "fascist" AfD. One of the main promoters of this idea within the Left Party is Gregor Gysi. Paradoxically the party alliance with left-liberal parties was called "Strategies against the trend of the right". Trotskyist groups affiliated with the Left Party Marx 21, Socialist Alternative (SAV) and Revolutionary Internationalist Organization (RIO) even advocated an alliance with the Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union to stop the AfD. The Party’s leadership, particularly Katja Kipping and Bernd Riexinger, share the idea of a broad coalition. Sarah Wagenknecht, in turn, opposes this path.

"A common chancellor candidate with parties who still stand for dismantling the welfare state, poverty pensions, precarious jobs, TTIP, and weapons exports to war zones - that really would make the Left arrowless and feeble", she declared in interview for "WAZ" media group. On Party's Congress she blamed current coalition for its neoliberal policies and once again rejected the idea of anti-AfD coalition.

Geopolitical split

Thus we see that there are two lines with respect to the party position in the new environment within the Left Party leadership. On the one hand, Sarah Wagenknecht, old left, who openly sympathizes to Soviet and Eastern German "real socialism", pronounced against an alliance with left-liberal parties, who follow Atlanticist pro-American agenda. At the same time, she, like her husband, opposes unrestricted migration, because it is a tool of global capital used to undermine the position of native forcing class by creating a new reserve army of low-paid workers. In the case of the Lafontaine- Wagenknecht couple we see the union of the old Soviet "Stalinist" left and sovereigntist part of European Social Democracy on the personal and political levels. The Continentalist geopolitical orientation, anti-globalist stance, and the desire to protect the interests of German workers make this part of the left closer to Continentalist right-wing Eurosceptics, especially AfD.

On the other hand we see the supporters of the alliance "the East German reconstruction" (Gregor Gysi), libertarian left (Katja Kipping) and Trotskyites with establishment parties against AfD. The special attention of this alliance should be paid to the Greens, who represent a political movement that shares the emancipatory agenda of post-1968 left (Cultural Marxism), but totally lacks the ideas of protection of working class interests. In fact, all these new leftists are more concerned about the protection of minorities than the promotion of the interests of the German workers, thus becoming the most aggressive part of the liberals, promoting the same vicious globalist agenda. They want to not only outcast the AfD - they want to destroy any alternative for Germany, destroying the Left Party as a party of the German working class and reshaping it into a more leftist European, Soros-funded, migrant-loving pro-sodomy puppet gang of left-liberal doctrinaires. A victory of this line makes the displacement of Sarah Wagenknecht from the leading position of the party a matter of time. If she fails to find a partner for the anti-globalist fight, she and her supporters will be marginalized.

The most frightening scenario for the establishment and German globalists would be a unity, maybe not formal, but a deep and essential, mutual understanding and support between representatives of the left and right Continentalists. Then they would have a chance to resist the globalist coalitions together. Naturally, the globalists will try to prevent this by putting pressure on Sarah Wagenknecht and her supporters "from the left and on the AfD leader Frauke Petry - "from the Right. "

dimanche, 24 avril 2016

If a person has no philosophical thoughts, certain questions will never cross his mind. As a young man, there were many issues and ideas that never concerned me as they do today. There is one question, however, which has intrigued me for the longest time, and it still fascinates me as intensely as it did back then: Does spirit precede matter or is it the other way around? In other words, does human consciousness create what we perceive as our reality and the physical existence or vice versa; does the pre-existing material world determine our sentience and shape our cognition? In essence, what really lies beneath the surface of this question is the following: is a man born as a conscious being with a free will and self-determination or not?

Do not be alarmed; this is not an article on political philosophy. But it is a fundamental existential issue that I found underpins many of the doubts that I have regarding the functioning of our society and our political culture. While I freely admit I am no philosopher or expert in the field, in this article I will try to explain why the answer we choose to this crucial question, which most people never consider, has an amazing impact on the way we think, the way we live and act and the way society behaves as a whole. By diving deeper into this debate, we uncover important insights that can help us understand how our Western society and its cultural identity have vastly degenerated and especially why family values have so dramatically deteriorated. A clearer understanding of the historical evolution of this age-old question and its far-reaching implications will provide valuable insights into the intellectual crisis of our Western societies and the strategic suppression of dissent and of independent thought and it will shed light on the origins on the intellectual bondage that we know today as Political Correctness.

The Kantian heritage and the intellectual shackles of Nonage

I believe it makes sense to start our quest to settle this age-old question by looking at the works of Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804), the German philosopher who is considered the father of modern philosophy. In 1784 he wrote the following about Enlightenment:

“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) “Have the courage to use your own understanding,” is, therefore, the motto of the Enlightenment.”

Today’s economic and political forces seem to be cognizant of the peril posed by a free-thinking citizenry. As our western culture faces an existential crisis and suffers attacks from multiple fronts, the political elite appears to be focused on enforcing its will at all costs. They are desperately trying to keep a multitude of threats at bay, and failing to do so, they are content with simply having the public accept their failure as a strategic victory: the immigration crisis, chronic economic instability, geopolitical conflicts with horrendous human costs, violations of personal liberties, they are all to be taken as facts of life; this is sold to us as the new normal. Therefore, their priority is to keep the body politic in check, to crush dissent and rebel-rousing. To do so, laws against specific actions are not enough. To “keep the peace”, one needs to have laws against thought itself. By re-defining right and wrong, controlling the narrative and limiting independent thought and free speech, the public, as a whole, remains strategically malleable and intellectually manageable.

Given the success of this strategy, and bearing in mind Kant’s definition of Enlightenment, it seems pertinent to raise the question: did we ever manage to evolve into mature and enlightened individuals or are we still trapped in our own self-imposed nonage? I believe the latter is the case; and to further clarify my view, there is no better man to quote than Kant himself:

“Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large part of mankind gladly remains minors all their lives, long after nature has freed them from external guidance. They are the reasons why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor. If I have a book that thinks for me, a pastor who acts as my conscience, a physician who prescribes my diet, and so on–then I have no need to exert myself. I have no need to think if only I can pay; others will take care of that disagreeable business for me. Those guardians who have kindly taken our supervision upon themselves see to it that the overwhelming majority of mankind–among them the entire fair sex–should consider the step to maturity, not only as hard but as extremely dangerous. First, these guardians make their domestic cattle stupid and carefully prevent the docile creatures from taking a single step without the leading-strings to which they have fastened them. Then they show them the danger that would threaten them if they should try to walk by themselves. Now this danger is really not very great; after stumbling a few times they would, at last, learn to walk. However, examples of such failures intimidate and generally discourage all further attempts.”

The Frankfurt School and the origins of political correctness

What is becoming increasingly hard to deny, especially in Europe and the USA, is that we no longer have the absolute and inalienable right to free speech. Although we claim to be proud citizens of democratic societies that, in theory, respect and uphold individual freedoms, in practice, the definition of what constitutes free speech has grown so withered and so narrow, that it often makes a mockery of the very principle itself. More and more topics have been classified as “off limits”, the public expression of the “wrong” personal opinions and ideas has been criminalized and even academic or scientific research of certain fields has been suppressed. But symptoms of our socially enforced self-censorship are evident in everyday conversations as well: Is it not deeply unsettling that it is next to impossible to have a normal, temperate debate about the immigration crisis, which is an existential matter that will most likely shape the future of the European continent? The natural rights to one’s own independent thinking and to free speech have been heavily curtailed under the guise of what is now referred to as ‘political correctness’. Speaking one’s mind freely can have them branded as a pariah and a direct threat to society, but the repercussions do not end there: Self- censorship is also enforced through new laws implemented by our moral leaders, who feel that the power vested in them through their governmental offices extends to also placing limitations on what we can and cannot think.

250 years ago, Kant stressed the need for public debate as follows:

“It is very difficult for the individual to work himself out of the nonage which has become almost second nature to him. He has even grown to like it and is at first incapable of using his own understanding because he has never been permitted to exercise it. It is possible, however, for the public to enlighten itself. Indeed, if it is only granted freedom, enlightenment is almost inevitable. There will always be a few independent thinkers, even among the self-appointed guardians of the multitude. Once such men have thrown off the yoke of nonage, they will spread about them the spirit of a reasonable appreciation of man’s value and of his duty to think for himself. It is especially to be noted that the public which was earlier brought under the yoke by these men afterward forces these very guardians to remain in submission if it is so incited by some of its guardians who are themselves incapable of any enlightenment. That shows how pernicious it is to implant prejudices: they will eventually revenge themselves upon their authors or their authors’ descendants. Therefore, a public can achieve enlightenment only slowly. A revolution may bring about the end of a personal despotism or of avaricious tyrannical oppression, but never a true reform of modes of thought. New prejudices will serve, in place of the old, as guide lines for the unthinking multitude.”

In short, without the freedom to debate openly, the individual has not the means to escape his self-imposed nonage. Without the possibility to break free, and to enlighten ourselves, we remain powerless to question, to object to and to challenge the status quo. Like pieces on a chessboard, we have no say in our own fates and no control over the stratagems that we implicitly help to enforce. Silently complicit in devastating policies, in conflicts and in wars being fought in our name, we simply become bystanders and look on as our culture corrodes, our values degrade and our liberties are trampled upon. To understand how the modern man became complicit in his own intellectual subjugation, we have to go back and trace the roots of the crisis.

“Emancipation through indoctrination”

Free thought and free speech have always been intertwined and correlated. The demise of both has its origins in the years between 1930 and 1968 when a group of intellectuals and so-called philosophers came together to establish a school of thought that was essentially focused on destroying Western civilization and all that it stands for (including its economic system based on capitalism) through ‘emancipation’. Max Horkheimer, a Marxist philosopher, was one of the founding fathers of the Frankfurt School, which embodied modern Critical Theory and was to a great extent characterized as neo-Marxist. Horkheimer, along with Jürgen Habermas, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm, to name but a few formed the Frankfurt School and its Institute for Social Research, an intellectual think-tank, that shaped the cultural understanding of the West and Germany in particular. According to Horkheimer, the critical theory would serve “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them.” Accordingly, their main objective was to create the theoretical and ideological platform for a cultural revolution. This group of “philosophers” sought to, and to a great extent, succeeded in achieving their objective by focusing specifically on culture. It is a culture that forms the foundation that shapes peoples’ mindsets and political outlook by controlling the language and ideas through institutional channels, particularly education. In short, Critical Theory is the politicization of logic. Horkheimer stated that “logic is not irrespective of content,” by which he practically meant that an argument is logical if it aims to destroy Western civilization and it is illogical if it supports it. This is, of course, the cornerstone of “political correctness” and why the open and unrestrained debate is frowned upon as subversive and inflammatory. It breeds dissent and doubt, it encourages critical analysis and it prevents intellectual uniformity and group-think.

Critical Theory and the war on God

The Frankfurt School claimed that its Critical Theory is the theory of truth. The occidental philosophy, from St. Thomas Aquinas to Kant, as well as Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, and Goethe, should, therefore, be summarily dismissed and replaced by their own dogmatic set of rules and guidelines for “thinking right”. Critical Theory in sociology and political philosophy went beyond interpretation and understanding of society, it sought to overcome and destroy all barriers that, in their view, entrapped society in systems of domination, oppression, and dependency.

A principal yet controversial argument concerns their animosity towards religion and spirituality. According to the Frankfurt School, Christianity is the institutional revival of pagan philosophy and God is mere fiction. Religion led people to project their suffering to a divine entity, it served as a distraction from the misery caused by capitalism and in its core lies nothing but pure imagination. As the theories of Darwinism and Freudianism challenged the status of religion, accordingly, Marxism and Neo-Marxism dispelled the unenlightened mythical image of the age-old institutionalized divinity: Not God, but Man is the highest entity. Since it is not my purpose to discuss theology, but to demonstrate the mindset of the members of this school of thought, once again, I will refer to a quote by Immanuel Kant, who wrote the following in Critique of Pure Reason:

“Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider questions, which it cannot evade, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of the mind.”

Kant was known as a fierce critic of the practice of religion, but he recognized that cognition and rationalization are indicative of the human mind and spirit, and are the means by which the individual arrives at the conclusion that there is a God. The significance of this argument lies in Kant’s belief in the free will and determination of the human mind to develop this process of rationalization in order to arrive at the conclusion that man is essentially good. In this context, God is more of a metaphor for morality and this plays a decisive role in the fundamental spirit versus matter question: Man’s mind and spirit precedes matter. Essentially, Kant reconciled these two concepts in a way that highlights human consciousness and self- determination.

The Frankfurt School positioned its ideology at the opposite end of the spectrum. It professed that man is limited in his existence as a mammal and as a product of nature that is driven by basic needs. There is no room for free will, no capacity for critical judgment or ability to distinguish right from wrong, no awareness, and no rationalization. This position has its roots in their Marxist background, which argues that man is a product of society: his mind and spirit are determined and shaped by the material world. Because of this vulnerability to external factors, the human mind is thought of as frail and manipulable and therefore man cannot be held accountable for his own decisions. This idea served as the basis for the “de-criminalization of crime” thesis of the Frankfurt School. As per Habermas, because man is a product of society, it is inevitable that he adaptively yields to his criminal tendencies, since he is raised under the yoke of the structural violence of a criminal capitalist system.

The Frankfurt School believed that by stripping humanity of spirituality and by destroying the material surroundings created by the capitalist system and its structure, man will live free, without the feeling of responsibility and without the burden of conscience. They promised freedom, without free will, they envisioned emancipation, through intellectual assimilation and they guaranteed fairness, without justice.

The strategic importance of public education

According to the Frankfurt School, the system’s malfunction starts with the family. The family is the first and primary moral entity that we encounter. This entity raises children in an authoritarian manner that creates submissive, obedient and dependent adults. In other words, it is the family that primes and programs us for fascism. Thus, by discrediting and destroying the family as a concept, one can nip capitalism and fascism in the bud. With this antagonistic attitude towards the family unit in society, combined with their ideological crusade against spirituality, the Frankfurt philosophers needed to put forward an alternative, to replace the old ways with their own roadmap for the future. In their view, the answer was simply to reprogram and reengineer society so that everyone behaves as is expected by others and so that human behavior becomes an act of reciprocity. This alone would be the universal code of ethics governing their utopia. To instill and to enforce this code in society, they proposed the use of institutions, and most importantly, education. Commandeering these institutional channels would be the most efficient way to impose and to promote their ethics, with education providing the key to assured compliance, weeding out dissent and any potential for future independent thinking by the individual.

The repercussions of this strategy are obvious in today’s society. Public education has conditioned us since childhood not to question the government and its collectivist policies. Maybe you remember one of our latest articles about the origins of the public education system, in which we introduced you to Wilhelm Wundt, the father of experimental psychology (and his proponents John Dewey and Edward Thorndike in the U.S.), the scientist who shaped today’s state education approach. He based his methodology on the following assumption: “Man is devoid of spirit and self-determinism”. He then set out to prove that “man is the summation of his experience, of the stimuli which intrude upon his consciousness and unconsciousness.” The great H. L. Mencken wrote in 1924 that the aim of public education is not: “ […] to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence… Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim… is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States… and that is its aim everywhere else.”

The rise of Cultural Marxism

The Frankfurt School developed the dogma that “freedom and justice” are dialectic terms, meaning that they stand in opposition to each other, in a zero-sum game, where “more freedom equals less justice” will be the consequence and “more justice equals less freedom” is the outcome. Based on this dialectic, freedom stood as the thesis, and justice reflected the anti-thesis.

This rather interesting dialectic approach was adopted from the ideas and works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The Frankfurt School, however, twisted the core of the concept and denatured its consequential logicality. In short, the main difference between Hegel and Horkheimer’s dialectic approach lies in the conclusion: Hegel, an idealist, believed like Kant that spirit creates matter, while for Horkheimer, a disciple of Karl Marx and his theory of materialism, the opposite was the case. Marx postulated that the world, the objective reality, can be explained by its material existence and its development and not from the realization of a divine absolute idea or as a result of rational human thought, as adopted in idealism. Therefore, putting limits on the material world, placing external rules and guidelines on the environment within which individuals live, think and operate, should, in their view, suffice to shape their cognitive experience and confine their spirit to the “desired” parameters.

I believe this is the key point that links the Frankfurt school of thought to what we know today as “political correctness”. At its core, we find this familiar false belief that less freedom guarantees more justice, and therefore more security. This mantra is regurgitated through institutional and political messaging, instilled in social values and planted in the minds of the younger generation and future voters, though the educational channel, just like the Frankfurt School intended. Instead of creating the platform to encourage individual human development, by reasoning, raising questions and stimulating dialogue, the institutional system works as an assembly line, from cradle to grave, and it successfully standardizes individuals and primes them to submit to the status quo, to accept and not to question. This is the logic of Critical Theory and the core element of “political correctness”. It is a vain and doomed attempt to control the inherent entropy of human ideas and independent thinking, to force the flux of our intertwined and unique experiences to an unnatural stasis and ultimately, to break Man’s spirit and to bring his mind to heel. .

Now you can maybe understand what Tom DiLorenzo meant in one of our latest interviews about “cultural Marxism” when he said: “They largely abandoned the old “class struggle” rhetoric involving the capitalist and worker “classes” and replaced them with an oppressor and an oppressed class. The oppressed include women, minorities, LGBT, and several other mascot categories. The oppressor class consists of white heterosexual males who are not ideological Marxists like them.” When the members of the Frankfurt School were forced to leave Germany during Nazi rule, they moved to the USA, near Hollywood, and they established strong ties with Columbia University and Harvard. This is how they spread their influence in the United States and aside from Hollywood, they also turned the academic elite at most universities into reservoirs of “cultural Marxism”. Here in Europe, some of the most prominent names in politics today were among the 1968 rebel students who were mentored by the first generations of the Frankfurt School. These include former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and his Minister of Defense Joschka Fischer, current Vice-President of the German Bundestag, Ulla Schmidt, and last but not least Chancellor Angela Merkel. On the anniversary of “60 years Christian-Democratic-Union (CDU)” on June 16th, 2005 in Berlin, she explained how many changes in society which were triggered in 1968 have shaped the old German Republic and continue to influence the CDU to this day. As she put it: “We don’t want to return to the family concept, to the 1950s image of a woman and we don’t want to return to the sociopolitical frame of that time. We as women must march through the institutions und take our place in the key power positions in the leadership of this country”.

My understanding of cultural Marxism is that it has nothing to do with freedom, or with cultural enlightenment and social progress. Instead, as Horkheimer himself put it, it is all about the creation of identical individuals who do not come together and exchange ideas, as they operate like mindless machines. The Frankfurt School and its followers have therefore clearly proved to be the enemies of freedom and the conscious human mind.

In conclusion, let me yield the closing words to Immanuel Kant, who wrote, “ A large degree of civic freedom appears to be of advantage to the intellectual freedom of the people, yet at the same time it establishes insurmountable barriers. A lesser degree of civic freedom, however, creates room to let that free spirit expand to the limits of its capacity. Nature, then, has carefully cultivated the seed within the hard core–namely the urge for and the vocation of free thought. And this free thought gradually reacts back on the modes of thought of the people, and men become more and more capable of acting in freedom. At last free thought acts even on the fundamentals of government and the state finds it agreeable to treat a man, who is now more than a machine, in accord with his dignity.”

dimanche, 10 avril 2016

The Left’s Psychological Warfare Against Europeans

By Ricardo DuchesneEx: http://www.counter-currents.com

I can’t think of a more insidious phenomenon in our times than the manipulation of the moral sensibilities of Europeans to bring about their own destruction, and it is the Left that’s in charge of this manipulation, which should be designated as a form of psychological warfare.

The most successful instance of the Left’s psychological operations was the use of the picture of the Syrian child’s lifeless body[2] washed ashore on a Turkish beach in September, 2015. It was this picture that led to an outpouring of European charity and solidarity with thousands of refugees and migrants. But this is only one instance of the immensely successful and many-sided psychological operations the Left has invented and used over the last few years to break the European will to fight even as their countries face a full scale migrant invasion costing them billions and bringing social chaos and thousands of rapes.

It is imperative to learn more about the psychological operations of the Left in its war against European identity.

The Left Knows

It is the Left in our current Western world that has claimed for itself the highest moral principles in the course of advancing its political and economic programs. Diversity came from the start wrapped up with high sounding moral principles about the equal dignity and good will of all peoples on earth, with exhortations directed at their Europeans to show compassion for the suffering of others, overcome their greed and racist impulses in the name of a more harmonious world wherein humans would finally create a world in which their angelic side would flourish.

The Left could have been excused as naively utopian when it started advocating these ideals. But no longer. People preoccupied with their own private lives, not politically in the front lines, can be excused for holding these beliefs. But not the leading propagandists, writers, teachers, government employees who work daily to instil these beliefs on the public.

It has now become evident that immigrant multiculturalism has not worked in the way it was anticipated. The Left has had enough time to learn about the raping of girls on “industrial scale” across Europe[4] by Muslim gangs, to ascertain the racial character of riots in Paris[5], Sweden[6], London[7], to think about the costs of illegal immigration[8], to realize that the majority of “refugees” are economic migrants[9], to witness entire towns and cities transformed into homogeneously Asian[10], Muslim, or Mestizo places. The list of failures is long, and the evidence is readily available in the internet.

Yet the Left not only continuous to press forward but has doubled up and tripled down in its efforts to promote mass immigration and accuse as “Islamophobic” anyone who questions the raping of girls in Europe. The Left is still, to this day, more than ever, calling for an end to “White supremacy” even in cities that are no longer majority White, for an end to “White privilege” even in workplaces that are totally dedicated to minority hiring, for an end “to everyday racism” even in campuses totally controlled by diversity politics.

We can no longer simply say that the Left is naive, pathological, trapped inside an ideology that does not allow it to see reality for what it is, that many of them are suffering from personality disorders. The Left knows, or at least refuses to know, that many of its ideals have not worked as they had said they would, and they know that many of its arguments are flawed[11] and the evidence does not support their beliefs. They know that race and gender are not mere social constructs, that there is scientific evidence, fully researched papers and books showing that human behaviour is deeply influenced by genetic factors, but they are either wilfully ignoring the evidence or attacking it by simply repeating the same ideas they learned five decades ago. Feminists know that something is amiss in their excessive preoccupation with micro aggressions and their refusal to speak out against Muslim macro aggression against girls in Europe[12].

Break Their Moral Will

This is what the Left is doing: it is promoting diversity by employing techniques of persuasion which target the value system of their own people, their moral sensibilities, in order to get them to accept their own ethnic displacement and celebrate the cultures of others. There are three readily available entries on the meaning of psychological warfare in the internet, providing varying insights, though none captures the unique techniques of psywar developed by the Left in recent years. But it only takes a bit of reordering of the wording of these definitions to bring out what is novel about Leftist techniques. The Encyclopaedia Britannica‘s[13] definition is a good start.

Psychological warfare, also called psywar, the use of propaganda against an enemy, supported by such military, economic, or political measures as may be required. Such propaganda is generally intended to demoralize the enemy, to break his will to fight or resist, and sometimes to render him favourably disposed to one’s position. Propaganda is also used to strengthen the resolve of allies or resistance fighters. The twisting of personality and the manipulation of beliefs in prisoners of war by brainwashing and related techniques can also be regarded as a form of psychological warfare.

The use of psychological warfare is of ancient origin, but this quoted passage captures well its current understanding as a form of warfare that presupposes the use of modern mass media to demoralize the enemy and to strengthen the resolve of friends. In order to make use of this definition all we need to do is understand that the Left does not believe in the age-old enemy-friend distinction. The Left is against the use of this distinction as a marker of collective identity and difference, as a way of contrasting in-groups and out-groups. The Left believes that it can abolish this distinction by promoting an ideology that is “inclusive” and that brings all races together in a culture that celebrates “unity-in-diversity.”

The first and most important phase in the Left’s plan is to promote diversity through mass immigration and multiculturalism in the West. But in seeking to bring about this reality the Left cannot but confront ideological enemies and friends. Therefore, the enemy the Left has in mind when it engages in psywar is purely ideological, and since the central value of the Left is diversity, and diversity is accomplished by bringing non-White out-groups inside White areas, then non-Whites are in essence not enemies of the Left. Whites who agree with the ideology of diversity, the very Whites who make up the Left and its pro-diversity ideology, are not enemies either. But Whites as such, in essence, are ideological enemies of the Left, since their existence violates the principle of diversity. The most hated ideological enemies of the Left are Whites who self-consciously organize as in-groups to protect their identity against diversity.

Using the definition above, we can say that the psywar of the Left consists in using propaganda, the ideology of diversity, to demoralize the enemy, Whites as such, “to break his will to fight or resist.” It also consists in using diversity to strengthen the resolve of out-groups in their diversification of White areas, and the resolve of ideological Whites who believe in diversity.

The Left is engaged in warfare in the sense that it aims to bring about a total end to its perceived enemies, and this warfare is psychological in that it involves the use of propaganda to alter the minds and hearts of Whites as such. Propaganda is “a form of biased communication, aimed at promoting or demoting certain views, perceptions or agendas.” The Left knows that it is engaged in propaganda, biased communication; it knows that most refugees are not children, but male adults[14]. It knows that Western nations are not “immigrant nations.”[15] It knows that immigration does not enrich European identity, and it knows that there is much evidence already accumulated, facts and arguments, challenging its beliefs, yet it wilfully ignores or sidesteps the counter-arguments, and presses with its propaganda.

The Left believes it has a mandate to bring diversity at all costs against its central enemy: European identity as such, and European ethno-nationalists. Yet it employs the very sensibilities of Europeans as such to bring about its agenda. It uses the longings of Europeans for cosmopolitan peace, their fair-even minded attitudes towards members of out-groups, in order to persuade them to forego their identity. It uses these ideals and attitudes as if they were consistent with diversification and mass immigration, even though the Left knows that Europeans, and only Europeans, created notions of human rights[16] and fair play vis-a-vis out groups, and that non-Europeans will endorse these ideals only to advance their particular ethnic interests.

The immorality of the corporate Right is easily objectionable; its hedonism and consumerism; its greed-driven policies, lack of loyalty to traditions and national identities, but in the end the capitalistic Right has never pretended to be for anything else other than for free markets, growth, and a legal framework friendly to business. (Mind you, the Right does employ its own version of psychological warfare, besides its use of the old fashion type, about which I will write in the future.)

The Left Knows Its Target

The second definition, from Wikipedia[17], allows us to go further in our understanding of the Left’s warfare against Whites as such and Whites as conscious in-groups.

The term is used “to denote any action which is practiced mainly by psychological methods with the aim of evoking a planned psychological reaction in other people.” Various techniques are used, and are aimed at influencing a target audience’s value system, belief system,emotions, motives, reasoning, or behaviour. It is used to induce confessions or reinforce attitudes and behaviours favourable to the originator’s objectives, and are sometimes combined with black operations or false flag tactics. It is also used to destroy the morale of enemies through tactics that aim to depress troops psychological states.

The Left has been in charge of the culture and morality of the West for decades. It knows how to “evoke a planned psychological reaction” in Whites by appealing to their disposition to judge individuals regardless of race and sexual orientation against any semblance of racist behavior. They know how to destroy the morale of any White who shows in-group preference through accusations of racism and charges that they are exhibiting neo-Nazi attitudes. They know that Whites believe in equality and that it works to talk endlessly about discrimination and global inequality. The Left consciously “targets” the value system and emotions of Whites to bring about its political ends.

It is psychological warfare, a conscious manipulation of images and ideals, biased propaganda by a Left that knows they are using deceptive arguments and facts. When Leftists say that “more than half of the global wealth”[18] is owned by the 1 percent residing mainly in the West, they know they are misleading students into thinking that this “global wealth” is somehow a communal pot that belongs to everyone in the world even though Western nations create their own wealth through innovations and efficient institutions. The Left knows, or should know, that non-European nations are “happily racist,”[19]sexist[20], and that diversity increases ethnic nepotism[21].

The Left knows that non-Western cultures are far more collectivist and in-group oriented in their racial and tribal attachments[22], whereas Westerners are individualistic and more tolerant of outsiders, and this is why they willfully target the individualist value system of Europeans with accusations of racism so as to demoralize them and allow their countries to be taken over by collectivist cultures, which the Left celebrates as harbingers of multiculturalism.

Jacques Ellul is cited in the Wikipedia entry saying that a common form of psychological warfare between nations involves “dealing with a foreign adversary whose morale he seeks to destroy by psychological means so that the opponent begins to doubt the validity of his beliefs and actions.” The foremost adversary of the Left is European in-group identity, and this is why the Left has been teaching for decades to impressionable children and young students that emotional attachments to in-groups are not only backward and illiberal, but “a personality disorder, a public health pathogen.”[23] Yet the same Left welcomes the far more collectivist and racist cultures of immigrants[24] and passes laws protecting this collectivist heritage[25]. They know this is a flagrant double standard.

Once you know what motivates your target, you are ready to begin psychological operations…The form of communication can be as simple as spreading information covertly by word of mouth or through any means of multimedia…Your primary weapons are sight and sound. PSYOP can be disseminated by face-to-face communication, audio visual means (television), audio media (radio or loudspeaker), visual media (leaflets, newspapers, books, magazines and/or posters). The weapon is not how its sent, but the message it carries and how that message affects the recipient.

There is no other way to describe the Left’s use of the three-year-old Syrian child washed ashore on a beach than as a most successful form of psychological operation relying simply on an image. This picture played a critical role in energizing Europeans to stage mass rallies “welcoming refugees” across Europe[27]. Leftists know that in Germany alone migrants committed over 400,000 crimes in 2015[28], including 1,688 reported sexual assaults against women and children. Yet their reaction was to cover up these facts, defend the perpetrators as victims of “Western imperialism,” or simply try to spread false information[29] so as to take blame away from refugees and direct it to German males.

No other conclusion can be reached but that the Left is willfully carrying out a form of psychological warfare based on deception, manipulation, and false accusations, with the intention of destroying European identity, while pretending to be the representatives of the highest ideals of Western civilization.

mardi, 22 mars 2016

The Left’s Hollow Empire

By Jarosław Ostrogniew

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com

Stranger in a Strange Land

For the last ten years I have been involved in the Right scene, mostly nationalist and traditionalist, both on the internet and in real life. I am perfectly aware of all the vices of this scene (the backstabbing, sectarianism, in-fighting, alcoholics, kooks, renegades) as I have experienced them first-hand. However, I am also perfectly aware of all the vices of the Left scene. And over the years I have come to the conclusion that Left is morally corrupt, weak, and inferior to the Right.

You see, for the last ten years I have been also working as a translator (although it has never been my only job). And as I specialize in social work, I have mostly worked in international projects, funded by the European Union and other trans-national organizations. So far I have worked with state institutions, NGOs, schools, universities, churches, professionals, and volunteers from all European countries (members and non-members of the EU), North America, and some African and Asian countries, including Turkey, Nigeria, Ghana, the United Arab Emirates, or Kazakhstan.

As you can guess, I have worked in a predominantly leftist environment. And since I have become a convinced nationalist some fifteen years ago, you can wonder how I managed to remain in this job. I got into this work by chance and coincidence, and there were no satisfying (financially or otherwise) alternatives at that time. And the three main factors that made it possible for me to keep working in this leftist environment are the main vices of the Left: narcissism, incompetence, and greed.

The Dark Triad of the Left: Narcissism, Incompetence, Greed

According to my experience the Left is extremely narcissistic. They are often the kind of people who don’t want to have children so they can have more time to post selfies on Instagram. When I first started working, I thought I was going to argue with everyone about everything due to the obvious worldview differences. However, most of the leftists I have met, coming from all over the world, are so narcissistic that it is difficult to say anything during a conversation with them. They drift away into endless monologues about themselves, and “I,” “me,” “my” are the most used words. If I wanted to speak my mind, in most cases I would have to just interrupt and change the topic — which would turn into another monologue once it would be the other party’s turn to speak. To provide an example: I have worked with a person, whom I would meet at least weekly outside of work (riding the same bus, etc.), so there were plenty of occasions for small talk. And it was after more than a year that this person asked me about my personal life (namely my marriage). Which means that for over 50 conversations I was never asked any relevant question, I just listened to monologues.

I do not like dishonesty, but on the other hand I am not very effusive, so when I started the job, I decided that I will answer honestly any straight-forward question regarding my beliefs or anything related. So far, for over a decade, not one such question was asked. And bear in mind, that being involved in such projects includes lots of socializing: obligatory dinners or cultural events during which work is not the number one topic. And as I listen more than I talk, during countless monologues I have learned a lot about these people, starting with details of their intimate or family lives, their ridiculous beliefs, and enough gossip, in-fighting, and back-stabbing to avoid any non-obligatory socializing with them. Honestly, going to sleep early is much more fun than partying with international leftists. I have never encountered such levels of narcissism, even in my high school times.

Nobody asks me about my views, but even if they did, they would probably still have to work with me. And the reason is incompetence. You see, most of these leftist professional project managers and participants are not very professional. They have a good knowledge of foreign languages, paperwork and office skills, etc. But many of them just cannot do it. They have to hire people from outside of their organizations or their environment who will do the more complicated stuff (such as converting .doc files to .pdf files). And if you specialize in certain fields, there is usually not much competition. To hide their incompetence, leftists will often choose the model of declaring certain skills and then paying someone from their pockets to do the work for them, so they can just sign it with their name.

The last component of the Dark Triad of the Left is greed. Sure, leftists really are leftist. They honestly believe in all this nonsense. And sure, the projects are aimed at realizing those aims. However, only the youngest volunteers are engaged and idealistic. They do all the dirty work — such as actually working with people — for free. The managers and others do it for the money. And many of them don’t give a damn about the beliefs of anyone they work with. If any of their co-workers was outed as “evil conspiracist” or something of that sort and was publicly denounced as a heretic, they would probably loudly denounce him, but still pay him unofficially to do the work that needs to be done and that they cannot do themselves because of their lack of skills. I know some people with politically incorrect views, which they discuss openly, who are ghost-working for politically correct organizations, and are paid outside of the pay list.

The Left is Everywhere . . .

I have witnessed the hegemony of the Left in countless institutions. The belief in equality and the need to eradicate existing identities in order to create a humanist utopia pervades NGOs, schools, academia, and churches. These institutions which do not adhere to this ideology are excluded from most important international grant systems (which means that they have no access to actual money).

Interestingly, I have worked with a few churches (various Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant denominations) and I can tell you that when it comes to social ideology, they are hardcore egalitarians. The only difference is that they believe that this humanist post-racial utopia will be much better if it is sprinkled with holy water or someone puts a cross at top of it. Even more interestingly, I have worked with quite a few Muslims, and many of them believe the same thing, except that they would prefer an imam to recite Quran verses over this utopia.

Unfortunately, in these parts of the world I got to know or I met people coming from them, there are institutions which promote the leftist worldview and which are doing quite well due to the existing international system of grant-funding supported by western governments. However, they have no real popular support. Their popular support is based on people who come to the events the institutions organize for free (the EU pays, the participants don’t). However, most of them do not support the organizations financially in any way, and if they had to pay, 99% of the popular support would disappear.

. . . But Not Everyone is Leftist

I have never expected to meet anyone but leftists during my work. But as it turns out, reality was much more complex. Of course, the majority of the people I have worked with were leftists. But if you listen to people you can learn quite a lot — probably because they presume that if you don’t voice your objections, it means that you agree with them.

First of all, there are those who don’t really have any views at all. Generally, they don’t support any ideology. They sort of believe in the leftist paradigm, but on the other hand they don’t really support it, and if the paradigm changed, they would not really mind. What they care mostly about are their paychecks and other profits arising from the projects.

Secondly, there are people who agree with the liberal values but they do not agree with the way they are realized or protected. These are the kind of people who support EU and gay marriage and despise conservatives, but they oppose Muslim immigration because it interrupts the realization of the humanist utopia in Europe. It seems that it is mostly people from Western Europe who fall into this category.

Thirdly, there is the most interesting group: people who reject at least partially the leftist ideology. The existence of such people in the leftist environment surprised me the most.

For instance, one man I have worked with, an older teacher in his 60s, coming from an “old EU” country, who has a few people of mixed ethnicity in his organization and who had previously told me about the merits of Che Guevara, all of sudden tells me that jazz is for blacks, and whites should listen to their own music, that it is the Jews who are pushing African culture on whites, and that Ezra Pound was a great poet and a visionary, with a great understanding of world politics. The same man votes for his local labor party and changes his profile pic on Facebook to the rainbow flag or “Je suis Charlie.” A middle-aged woman from Eastern Europe, who actively promotes “anti-anti-Semitism” etc. tells me that multiculturalism is the main cause of crime in Europe. A young student (after a few glasses of wine) tells me that he can’t wait for the EU to fall apart and we go back to nation-states free of non-European immigrants.

Unfortunately there are lots of outright and hardcore leftists involved in these projects, and while they may not constitute the majority of the workers, they are the loudest minority and it is often they who dictate what others do. They are also the most incompetent and arrogant of the people involved, who due to their dark personalities and lack of opposition to their exploitation of other people, have made it to the top of their organizations.

The Work of the Left is Useless

If you live in Europe, especially in Eastern Europe, you must have heard countless times about the EU-funded international projects. Let me tell you from first-hand experience: they are useless. The official aim of the projects is, of course, to heal the world and make it better for you and for me, and the entire human race. But in reality they boil down to flying several dozen of people from various countries to one place, having them sleep in hotels and eat out, discussing the documents they have already produced and deciding how to produce their next documents. There are some actual actions which benefit some small numbers of people, but these are extremely rare. There are many more instances of organizations not doing anything productive, but producing very impressive documents. For instance, the social projects are hell-bent on promoting ideas or actions in the local community. In reality this is not impressive at all: people who belong to a NGO also belong to another NGO, so they invite their five friends to listen to one of their PowerPoint presentations, and then they switch sides, and they listen to presentations by their friends on another project. So while the projects are aimed at immanentizing the eschaton, they are hardly the means to achieve it.

However, the projects are very effective at creating something different: a class of uprooted unprofessionals who are attached by the umbilical cord of project administration to the budget of the EU. These people are totally dependent on the EU administration and will do anything to support it. These “professional EU project teams” are an odd bunch: often, they are no-lifes who vegetate in rented rooms in their homelands, but who spend their lives on traveling from one project meeting to another. It is like an impoverished jet set: people who travel by planes, sleep in good hotels, and eat out twice a day while on project meetings, but cannot afford to rent a whole apartment at home. Administration of these projects often does not pay much in actual money, but when you consider the costs of traveling and accommodation, they are extremely costly, and they provide people who are hardly wealthy with a luxurious lifestyle.

This “project class” is highly cosmopolitan and alienated from its original society, for instance a Bulgarian living in Spain whose husband is an Estonian living in Portugal, or a Ukrainian Jew living in the Netherlands married to a Nigerian from the United Arab Emirates residing in the United Kingdom. These are ideal EU citizens: uprooted, with no actual identity, with skills useless in any other field, totally dependent on the preservation of the European status quo. Especially in Eastern European countries, with no career opportunities for people with college degrees in social sciences and humanities, this is basically how the EU bureaucracy corrupts the youth.

And it is this kind of people who are doing most of the work of the Left. They are useless unprofessionals — however, they are perfectly aware that there is no future for them outside of the EU-funded NGO network. Thus, they will defend the EU to their last breath. But let’s be honest: it will not be a very fierce defense.

dimanche, 20 mars 2016

The Left is Inferior

By Jarosław Ostrogniew

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com

The Left is Intellectually Inferior

While reading rightist (especially Alt-Rightist) literature or blogs I see a pervading conviction that the Left is intellectually superior to the Right. I think this conviction arises from the fact that most modern intellectuals are leftist, and that liberal academia and media distort the intellectual history of the West and pretend that it has always been this way. It is not true, and thanks to the work of various Alt-Right authors we know it.

But the fact that most intellectuals are now leftists does not mean that most leftists are intellectuals. The leftists I have worked with are probably the cream of the crop who receive the most funding and occupy important positions in NGOs, academia, and other public institutions.

Let us just begin with the fact that most of what the Left believes — egalitarianism, the blank slate, cultural reductionism, radical constructivism, etc. — has been proven by scientists and thinkers to be untrue. To put it more straightforwardly: most beliefs of the Left are bullshit.

But leftists often don’t even know their bullshit very well. They know a few quotes — mostly mis-quotes of leftist authors that they have heard from their mentors — but often don’t read the actual books. And those few who read often have problems understanding them or putting them in context. Except for a few leftist professors I have encountered, it was usually I who had the best knowledge of leftist literature in the room.

Furthermore, leftists are the modern equivalent of puritans. They are just as fanatical. They consider other views to be heresy and the so-called “extreme right” as evil incarnate and the voice of the devil. Thus, they refuse to listen to what nationalists are saying. They often turn off the TV or literally cover their ears when nationalists appear in the media. They also refuse to read anything written by their opponents, as the words of Satan may corrupt your soul, and by talking with heretics you let Satan’s words spread and poison the world. Thus, leftists (apart from rare exceptions) don’t have a clue about any non-leftist literature and have a very perverted view of what we believe. And they take pride in being unwilling to change that.

The Right is much more interested in the Left and knows it far better than the other way around. The educated rightists I know have at least basic knowledge of leftist literature, and some are quite fluent in leftist ideas, which they consciously reject. Even the most educated leftists I knew (including those who claim to be interested in the history of ideas) know only basic memes about the Right perpetuated by the anti-racist/anti-white outlets.

The Left is Morally Inferior

Another myth on the Right is that many leftists are idealists who devote their lives to attaining leftist goals. It is true that some leftists are idealists and that some of them devote their time to realizing the goals of the Left. But for the most part, leftist activists either get paid for what they do — by various municipal, national, international government agencies, and institutions — or they don’t really devote much of their time to activism. Most of the Left’s activism is limited to the internet, especially social media, and all the real-life political events are actually social events with an added political veneer. (All this, unfortunately, is also true in the case of the Right, but it is a totally different topic.)

The two examples of mythical fierce real-life leftist activism are the black bloc and the antifa. The black bloc seems to be a violent and effective street force, but in reality it is a joke infiltrated by undercover police agents. Some of their actions may seem spectacular, but this is just window smashing which does not cause any serious political change. The antifa are the pitbulls of political correctness, and just like the black bloc they can only exist because they are tolerated by the police or even used by certain forces within the system to realize their own aims. Especially in Eastern Europe they have not managed to achieve anything, and all their supposed victories were the result of the intervention of external agents, such as various government agencies or organized crime.

When you turn to non-violent activism, the Left is even more pathetic. Unmarried aging women meet in a cafe with some beta orbiters, where they bitch about their jobs, take a few pictures for posting on Facebook, proclaim they have organized another “seminar,” and then go outside to smoke a joint.

However, when money becomes involved, then the real face of Left’s morality is revealed. The leftists I have worked with had no reservations about wasting or simply embezzling money they have been entrusted by various agencies, for instance spending money earmarked for a project on a vacation, or even something as petty as collecting used bus tickets from friends then getting reimbursed for them as travel expenses. They believe that they are the best people in the world and that they deserve to get money from the dumb masses of inferior tax-payers. Now, you might wonder how I know this. Simple: leftists love to talk about themselves, and they take pride in such cleverness.

But why does nothing happen to them? Wouldn’t revealing such fraud be enough to deal the Left a deadly blow? Unfortunately not.

For one thing, there is little to no oversight. Grants are supposed to be awarded based on anonymous peer review by unbiased experts, but the whole process is corrupt. Vast sums are dispensed by non-anonymous, biased, non-experts. These are usually leftists deciding that other leftists are to be given money. Then the parties change roles, and the recipients of grants dispense money to the people who just sat in judgment over them. And exactly the same people oversee the realization of one another’s projects. It is a closed circuit of leftist money wasting.

And even when frauds are uncovered — as in the case of one activist who wasted project money on buying a car — nothing is made public, lest the taxpayers threaten to cut off funds. The agencies dispensing public funds have more to lose by being honest than by being plundered, so they cover everything up.

Another proof of the Left’s moral inferiority is their tendency to abuse and exploit young activists. They attract young idealists, especially students, and then use them to do all their dirty work. I see nothing wrong with demanding a lot from activists if you believe you are working for a greater cause. But if the senior leader gets money and does nothing while volunteers are doing all the dirty (and futile) work, then something is wrong. Often, they use the activists to do personal work, such as running errands or even redecorating their homes. A good case study is a local activist who asks volunteers from her organization to go with her on vacation — she does not pay for them, of course — so they can watch her kids while she gets drunk.

I know that discussing personal issues of other people seems improper, but on the other hand it lets us know exactly who we are dealing with. Among the leftists I know, there are very few people who have happy marriages or families. Most of them are very hedonistic and narcissistic, thus they are unmarried, divorced, and usually have no kids. They are most often people of low moral character, who have no reservations about using every little occasion for some personal gain or pleasure: embezzling funds, getting drunk instead of working, or cheating on their spouses or partners. Another case study: a married middle-aged woman with young children who used various projects as a pretext to go to bed with her younger co-workers which resulted in a bitter divorce.

Furthermore, the supporters of the Left are not really willing to sacrifice anything. In most cases they only claim to support the movement, but when it comes to financial support or actually doing something, most of them suddenly disappear. In the cases I know the leftists either have no funds or the money comes from various government agencies or international organizations and corporations. The only idealists are the young volunteers, although in many cases they are just normies who want to “do something” but don’t really have a clue about politics. But they soon become disillusioned. Or they become greedy immoral professional activists themselves.

The Left is not United

It is a common myth on the Right, that while the rightists are divided, the leftists have clearly defined goals and are struggling together to achieve them. While I do agree that the Left has more common goals (privileges for sexual, religious, and ethnic minorities, the destruction of ethnically homogeneous countries and nations, etc.) I do not agree that the Left is united in realizing these aims. When it comes to issues of the hierarchy of these goals, the means of achieving them, or leadership, they are just as divided as the Right, or even more.

First of all, the Left is divided on which of these goals are more important. A good case study is the recent wave of Muslim violence against women in Europe. The question is what is more important for the Left: the rights of women or the rights of ethnic and religious minorities? The most popular strategy so far was to criticize Muslim misogyny in predominantly Muslim countries and to criticize “Islamophobia” in non-Muslim countries. However, now that the Muslim war on women has come to Europe, this issue has become much more complicated. Yes, many feminists have joined this real war on women, as they hate Europeans more than they love “the second sex.” But there are many leftists who disagree with this strategy. They believe that Muslims are no exception and that they should be forced to live according to leftist cultural norms. The list of such problems goes on and on. What comes first: workers’ rights or LGBTQ rights? What should the Left focus on: the economy or culture? Should the Left criticize popular culture or use it to spread its agenda?

Secondly, the Left is divided on the question of the means of achieving its aims. The issues of entryism, political violence, internet and real life activism, gaining funds, or cooperating with the government are all controversial. Again, there are no simple answers to these questions among the Left. Instead they operate in total chaos, do what seems possible at the moment, and often change their strategies. Thus their means often conflict, leading leftist organizations to oppose and cancel each other’s actions.

Thirdly, there is the problem of leadership. The Left is comprised of extremely narcissistic individuals, each of whom believes that he or she could become the glorious leader of a globalized world. Thus, every organization strives to dominate the movement, and every member strives to dominate his or her organization. The effect is a myriad of small organizations in a state of constant cold war with each other. It is very difficult for leftists to form a coalition, and most of their cooperation ends after a short time due to the differences mentioned above. The only thing that keeps up long-term collaborations is steady stream of external funds. Although money can also be a source of conflicts, and squabbles over the division of government funds have brought many leftist initiatives to an end.

The Left is far from a “let a thousand flowers bloom” strategy. It is more of a “let a thousand knives stab a comrade’s back” strategy. You think the Right is sick with sectarian infighting? Just talk to a drunk leftist who presumes you are on his side. Or browse the polemics in the comments sections or social media profiles of some edgy leftist publications. They really hate each other. Although I don’t think the Right so far has been able to use this infighting to its advantage.

The Left is Weak

All these experiences and reflections lead me to one conclusion: the Left is weak. It is a lifeless zombie which is kept going only by transfusions of money from the system it claims to oppose. The impotence of the Left is especially visible when contrasted with the vigor of the Alt Right. There is not one sect among the contemporary Left that is equally intellectually interesting.

During my years on the Right I have met some kooks and awful people that I try to avoid at all costs. But on the other hand, the best people I have met — and who proved to be my best friends — are mostly from the nationalist Right. There is not one leftist I have worked with that I would want to spend any amount of my free time with or that I know would be willing to help or support me in any way.

I am sure that if the Left were the object of the kind of hate campaigns directed at us, most of them would lose their nerve and simply quit. The nationalist Right is much harder due to years of more or less explicit persecution.

In my opinion, if we seize power — or rather, when we seize power — the white Left will not be an important opponent. Sure, they will start a moral panic. They will try to “do something.” But they will be nothing more than dogs yapping at a marching battalion. I am far more afraid of the state and its police agencies, organized crime, and ethnic minority groups, all of which will not hesitate to torture and kill us to cling to their power.

Nevertheless, the Left is an opponent that we will have to deal with. We have to use their weaknesses against them, especially their greed and opportunism. Once government and international funds are cut off from the Left, many people will just stop associating with them. Many of these people can be “bribed” into obedience. If young people are offered real jobs with real salaries doing real social work, they will not volunteer for leftist activism. When it comes to hardcore leftists, many can be discredited, fired, and even imprisoned by exposing their corruption and personal abuses. The few fanatics that would remain at large can be silenced, marginalized, and ignored just as we rightists are under the present regime.

The Left is Evil

Leftists really hate us. And by “us” I mean not just White Nationalists but all people of European descent who are not ashamed of their past. For instance, I talked with one of the young leftists I used to work with right after some nationalists managed to block a leftist event. She was obviously upset and devolved into an anti-nationalist rant. When I naively asked: “What exactly do these rightists advocate?” her reply was: “Well, of course they want to exterminate all minorities and their supporters. Like Hitler.” When I asked if she advocated killing nationalists in concentration camps like in the USSR or North Korea, the answer was that although these were fascist and nationalist states (sic!), some of their policies could be used to advance a good cause. Bear in mind that this was not a hardcore communist or antifa fighter but a liberal New Leftist and college social activist. Other interesting leftist political confessions include: children of conservatives should be taken away for adoption by homosexual couples, we should introduce a 100% inheritance tax and use the money to support leftist organizations, our fatherlands should no longer exist as a states, we should ban and burn all right-leaning books, etc.

I repeat: the Left really hates us. They consider us vermin that need to be exterminated by any means necessary. And they would kill us all, if only they had the power to do so. But they don’t. They are inferior, intellectually and morally, and largely ineffectual. I am not saying that we should ignore the Left. They are our true enemy, and this will not change. But they can be defeated. They can be disempowered, marginalized, and silenced. All of their work can be undone. We just have to decide when and how to strike. And we must not hesitate to strike with all necessary force once the time is right.

lundi, 01 février 2016

In his latest column Pat Buchanan writes eloquently about a “civil war on the right.” According to Pat, “conservatives” are now locked in mortal combat over the future of the American Right, and the sides are divided between the fans and despisers of populist presidential candidate Donald Trump. From this narrative it seems that while some “conservatives” are rooting for the Donald, others are ready to bolt the Republican Party if he picks up the Republican presidential nomination.

Although the events Pat describes are indeed unfolding, his label is misleading. Whatever political term one may decide to confer on Trump, most of those who are now railing against him, led by Rich Lowry and his band at National Review, are hardly “conservative.” They are essentially leftists, who are slightly less leftist than their friends at the Washington Post and at other national papers, whose editorial pages are graced by such “conservatives” as Jennifer Rubin, Charles Krauthammer, George Will, and Michael Barone. Much of what looks like the Right has been forced to live in the shadows since the neoconservatives in conjunction with the establishment Left helped to marginalize a truer Right in the 1980s. Real “conservative wars” did take place in the 1980s; and the paleoconservatives and paleolibertarians were overrun by the other side’s superior resources. The winning side was led by the neoconservatives who were helped significantly by the journalistic Left.

What happened in those years resulted in having “conservative” and “liberal” labels assigned to factions that had once belonged on the Left. By now of course the “conservative” label means whatever the media and our two official parties wish it to mean. Thus we encounter advocates of gay marriage, David Boas and John Podhoretz featured among National Review‘s “conservatives,” in a battle against the supposed interloper from the left, Donald Trump? It is certainly hard, and perhaps even impossible, to locate the “conservative” substance or worldview uniting the critics of Trump in National Review. Why should we think, for example, that National Review expresses “conservatism” when it protests Vladimir Putin’s critiques of “Western social decadence” and when a National Review-regular contributor wishes to intervene in Ukraine on behalf of the transgendered? Does the magazine represent the “conservative” side in international relations, as opposed to, say, self-described leftist Steven Cohen, who has urged greater moderation in dealing with the conservative nationalist Russian government?

Why are Republican presidential candidates who yearn to call Bibi and pledge him our unconditional support as soon as they’re elected taking the “conservative” side in anything? And is being in good standing with Rupert Murdoch and Sheldon Adelson the current operative definition of being a “conservative”? Perhaps Richard Lowry and Marco Rubio could answer this question for us. But it’s unlikely they would, since I’m considered to be the sworn enemy of “conservativism,” whatever that term has now come to mean. Not surprisingly, National Review and most of its anti-Trump critics ran to affix the label “conservative” to Mitt Romney, John McCain and to other centrist, leaning-left Republicans when they were nominated for president. The term “conservative” for these Trump-critics is synonymous with being acceptable to the Republican establishment.

It was also tiresome listening to Megyn Kelly on Fox news explain that “conservative luminaries” have denounced Trump as a leftist. Most of those who did the denouncing would have been viewed as social radicals by the American standards of the 1950s, that is, before the feminist and gay movements took over and before the government became an agency of accelerating Political Correctness. Further, the word “luminary” is one that I would reserve for figures of the stature of Shakespeare, Newton, Mozart, Goethe, and George Washington. Lesser but also significant luminaries in my time were Murray Rothbard, M.E. Bradford, Sam Francis and other brilliant thinkers whom Rich Lowry’s movement of yuppie journalists and pretentious cultural illiterates helped turn into non-persons.

Talking about the mislabeling of what Trump called a “dying” publication (which unfortunately is still not dead enough), the most unconvincing defense of NR’s tear against Trump was from those who wish to remind us that Bill Buckley set up a publication that would “stand athwart the time.” Since NR in 1955 was meant to be a “conservative” fortnightly, we are therefore supposed to believe that it has remained such. The problem with this evidence is that it proves nothing at all, except that in 1955 the founder of a particular enterprise had a certain intention which he may or may not have realized. One may doubt whether Buckley’s brain child ever realized its proposed goal (certainly those on the right whom he expelled would have questioned that).

But even if we do concede arguendo that the magazine was properly established to present conservative positions, why would I have to believe that sixty years later it is still doing the same thing? In the 1950s the New York Times was a pro-Eisenhower Republican newspaper; in 1940 the French daily Le Figaro was a right-wing nationalist one; and as late as fifteen years ago, Hans-Hermann Hoppe described the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung quite accurately to me as “eine bürgerliche Zeitung (a bourgeois newspaper).” All these publications are now integral parts of the propaganda apparatus of the multicultural Left, although Le Figaro and the FAZ may be more sympathetic to corporate capitalism than the spasmodically socialist NYT.

Newspapers and news magazines change their politics over the decades, and most of them that have survived into our now perfected “liberal democracies” have moved decidedly to the left on a wide range of social and political issues. Despite the fact that its advertising still features, with ample support from leftist friends, the “conservative” name brand, National Review has undergone the kind of fundamental change that has characterized other publications that once belonged recognizably to the Right. Evidence of how far to the left this fortnightly has moved became apparent to me when I chanced upon a long tribute on National Review-Online to the Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Particularly noteworthy about this fulsome tribute, by Steve Schwarz, was that it was prominently published in a “conservative” magazine.

The same publication had actively participated in purging and marginalizing those right-wing contributors (like me), who had failed to meet the PC criteria of the magazine’s control people. As I read NR’s tribute to a failed Communist global revolutionary, it dawned on me that what the editorial board understood as “conservative” was something far closer to Trotskyism than it was to what had passed for “conservatism” among NR’s founders in 1955. Needless to say, the term in question had signified something different to interwar opponents of the American welfare state than it did to Bill Buckley. Still, the two sides spoke to each other in a meaningful fashion. Although strife broke out on the right when Buckley espoused his own form of liberal interventionism, the anti-welfare state isolationists of the 1930s and the original editors of NR shared enough of the same universe of discourse to engage in communication. Moreover, by the present standards of ideological conformity that prevail at Lowry’s operation, the post-World War Two debates on what still looked like some kind of Right were models of free exchange. But today NR‘s editors and those whom they’ve helped flush down a memory hole could not even begin to hold a civil conversation. This may be attributed to the not insignificant fact that NR’s “conservatives” have taken over so much of the leftist spirit of the age that there is nothing conservative that they represent any longer.

See this quotation from NR; it’s unforgettable: “To my last breath, I will defend Trotsky who alone and pursued from country to country and finally laid low in his own blood in a hideously hot house in Mexico City, said no to Soviet coddling to Hitlerism, to the Moscow purges, and to the betrayal of the Spanish Republic, and who had the capacity to admit that he had been wrong about the imposition of a single-party state as well as about the fate of the Jewish people. To my last breath, and without apology. Let the neofascists and Stalinists in their second childhood make of it what they will.” [see Paul Gottfried’s commentary on Takimag.com, April 17, 2007]

Paul Gottfried [send him mail] is Horace Raffensperger Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Elizabethtown College and author of Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, The Strange Death of Marxism, and Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right. His latest book is Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers.

mardi, 05 janvier 2016

Nowadays, the United States exports almost nothing but weapons, noises, images and attitudes, and among the last, the black ghetto, keeping it real, thug, gangsta life is being gobbled up eagerly by millions all over, from Jakarta to Istanbul, to Berlin. White, yellow or brown, many pose enthusiastically as dwellers of the American black ghetto.

Their fantasy makeover is derived entirely from music videos and Hollywood films. In East Germany, the catalyst was Beat Street, one of the first hip-hop movies. Released in 1984, it was shown in East Germany merely a year later. Communist censors deemed it an indictment of Capitalism and the United States. To East German youths, however, it provided a mental escape from their Communist confinement. By spraying graffiti and break dancing, they could imagine themselves as living beyond the Iron Curtain.

Germany’s fascination and identification with American minorities started with the American Indian, whom many Germans still admire for his purity, simplicity and toughness. There is a saying, “An Indian feels no pain.” “Ein Indianer kennt keinen Schmerz.”

Just as the Germanic chieftain Arminius resisted Rome, defeated it in 9AD, the Amerindian is seen as a heroic warrior against much superior force. He’s also the antidote to the white man’s corruptions. Of course, Germany is still very white and, in many ways, the epitome of white civilization. Nevertheless, there is a longing among many Germans, at least occasionally, to strip away the deforming gown of civilization and be savage. Pagan impulses tug at the brand name underpants of each German.

Since the Amerindian is the ideal man, his society must be perfect, or nearly so. A most curious German, Christian Prieber, even had a plan to turn a Cherokee settlement into Utopia. Born in Saxony in 1697, Prieber was chased out for his subversive ideas, so he fled to England, leaving behind his wife and children. In 1735, Prieber arrived in the New World. After brief stops in Savannah and Charleston, Prieber ended up by 1736 in Great Tellico, a Cherokee town in present-day Tennessee. Accepted into their community, he quickly became their counselor. Prieber’s residence with the Cherokees ended after seven years, however, when he was arrested by the British. Accused of being an agent for the French, Prieber died in jail a year later.

Ludovick Grant, an English trader, described the prisoner, “he is a very extraordinary Kind of a Creature; he is a little ugly Man, but speaks almost all Languages fluently, particularly English, Dutch, French, Latin and Indian; he talks very prophanely against all Religions, but chiefly against the Protestant; he was setting up a Town at the Foot of the Mountains among the Cherokees, which was to be a City of Refuge for all Criminals, Debtors, and Slaves who would fly thither from Justice or their Masters […] being a great Scholar he soon made himself master of their Tongue, and by his insinuating manner Indeavoured to gain their hearts. He trimm’d his hair in the indian manner &amp; painted as they did going generally almost naked except a shirt &amp; a Flap. He told these people that they had been strangely deluded, that they had been tricked out of a great part of their Land by the English […] He proposed to them a new System or plan of Government, that all things should be in common amongst them, that even their Wives should be so and that the Children should be looked upon as the Children of the public and be taken care of as such and not by their natural parents […] that they should admit into their Society Creeks &amp; Catawbaws, French &amp; English, all Colours and Complexions, in short all who were of these principles […] He enumerates many whimsical Privileges and natural Rights, as he calls them, which his citizens are to be entitled to, particularly dissolving Marriages and allowing Community of Women, and all Kinds of Licenciousness […] it is a Pity so much Wit is applied to so bad Purposes.”

There is no evidence the Cherokees went along with Prieber’s social engineering, though they did accept his practical advices on how to deal with the treacherous and exploitative white man. He also taught them English measurements of distance and weight. An enemy of private property, organized religion and the nuclear family, Prieber was a Communist before his time. His gravitation towards the Cherokees is further proof of his rejection of Western Civilization. The Indians also provided him with a more malleable clay, he thought, to sculpt his Utopian masterpiece.

The more one identifies with the primitive, the more one rejects the elaboration and refinement of advanced civilization. Germans are among the most civilized, and I don’t measure that by bombastic monuments, but by the subtlest civilized gestures. Outside the entrance of a shopping mall toilet, I noticed management had left bowls of water and dog food, and inside each bathroom stall at my university, there is a toilet bowl scrubber to use if necessary. Germans also rarely jaywalk or litter. Of course, they have also produced guys with names like Bach, Beckmann and Sebald. I work on Beethoven Street. Hey, rambling schmuck, and what about dudes with names like Mengele, Heydrich and, uh, Hitler?! I’m talking about civilization’s forms, not its moral contents. Except when they go berserk, Germans are among the most domesticated. In this, they resemble the Japanese. Both have been superbly toilet trained.

Urbanized and cultured, Germans miss their earthier, more savage selves, and this persistent longing has surfaced in movements such as Wandervogel [Wandering Bird], Völkisch [Folksy] and Blut and Boden [Blood and Soil], the last of which painted the Jew as a degenerate, urban egghead, and the true German as a rigorous, pure and timeless being that’s dirt coated, sun-splashed and wind lashed, not unlike an American Indian. In the 70’s, some German anarchists dubbed themselves Stadtindianer, or Urban Indians. (They were modeled after an Italian group, Indiani Metropolitani. “We have unearthed the battle ax!” went a rallying cry. “Abbiamo dissotterrato l’ascia di guerra!”)

With the advent of hip hop, German malcontents have a contemporary role model. Instead of the mythical American Indian, they can now mimic American ghetto blacks, as purveyed by Hollywood. In Beat Street, there are many panoramas of the South Bronx, with its abandoned homes, garbage and graffiti. With no such slums, Germany didn’t look quite gritty or cool enough, so the ghetto had to be willed into being. So far, German graffiti sprayers, window breakers and litterers are only partially successful, but give them time. They’ll get there.

Leipzig’s most ghetto-like neighborhood is Connewitz, and it’s not because poor people live there, but because it’s a stronghold of Communists and Anarchists. There’s hardly a building that’s not repeatedly marred by spray paint, and most of the graffiti are free of political contents. It’s just vandalism. Defending it, a young female Leipziger explained to me, “They don’t really care about private property.” All of the mom and pops that make up the majority of Connewitz businesses must be repainted constantly. That this is such a huge waste of manpower and resources doesn’t bother the “green” progressives of Leipzig.

On December 12th, 2015, the left went violent when less than a hundred rightists marched through Connewitz. A thousand Communists, Anarchists and other self-proclaimed militants hurled stones and bottles, set fires, injured 69 cops, damaged 50 police vehicles and broke scores of windows in their own neighborhood. Banks, including local credit unions, were particularly targeted. As an indication of the German police’s restraint, none of the raging leftists were hurt, though 23 were arrested.

I walked through Connewitz the next afternoon. Seeing all the broken windows, I could easily picture a day when all of these businesses would be forced to evacuate, leaving this once lovely section to resemble the menacing and dismal black ghetto of the hip German rebel’s fantasy. You can’t be oppressed if you don’t dwell in the ghetto.

Rap has gone a long way since Beat Street. Though it is a diverse form, its most salient characteristic is aggression. One doesn’t even need to understand the lyrics to grasp this. With its extreme narcissism, glorification of violence and contempt for women, quite a bit of rap is also against any civilization, not just the white man’s. Other musical genres, such as punk and heavy metal, also flaunt anti-social attitudes, but they don’t have the circulation of rap, and some of their worst practitioners aren’t international icons.

Ya, ya, I’m just an old head who don’t know nothing about creativity. I’ve never heard of Blumio, the Japanese-German who fillets and fish wraps the news in rhymes, and I ain’t got no appreciation for the exhilarating, rapid-fire flow of Samy Delux when he claims, quite rightly, of course, that he’s Germany’s best poet, “Ich bin so Schiller, so Goethe / So bitter, so böse / Noch immer der größte / Poet der hier lebt.” “I’m so Schiller, so Goethe / So acerbic, so wicked / Still the greatest / Poet who lives here.”

One of the earliest German hip hop albums was called “Krauts with Attitude,” a clear nod to N.W.A., “Niggas with Attitude.” N.W.A. has become very mainstream, of course, as attested by the 2015 release of Straight out of Compton. Around Leipzig, I now see stickers and posters of seven masked German militants, under the heading “STRAIGHT OUT OF CONNEWITZ.”

With their hatred of the state, nation and law and order, German leftist radicals see American ghetto blacks, as portrayed in movies, music videos and newscasts, as kindred spirits. Of course, they have no familiarity with ordinary black folks who go to work and church, and cherish quite traditional values. Seeing blacks rioting in American cities, these Germans cheer and look forward to doing the same. Hating not just the worst aspects of civilization, but nearly all of it, they just want to tear everything down, for Utopia, you see, is just beyond the blood red horizon.

In Berlin, there’s a graffiti of a black man pointing a gun, “HANDS UP.”

In Leipzig, there’s a painted silhouette of a man hovering over an upturned skateboard, with a balloon tied to his wrist, “KILL COPS.”

In Leipzig, one end of a bench has, “NO BRAIN.” The other end, “HATE COPS.”

All of the anti-cop graffiti I’ve seen in Germany are written in English, by the way. This is only appropriate since many of these radicals’ firmest and most up-to-date beliefs have also been imported from the USA. Even the slogans are often the same, i.e., “NO MAN IS ILLEGAL.” Believing themselves so progressive, they’re actually just puppets of the empire. No Arminiuses, they’re bit players in Rome’s master scheme. Media masturbated, they’re preparing their own kind for rape.

The Best of Linh Dinh

Linh Dinh [send him mail] is the author of two books of stories, five of poems, and a novel, Love Like Hate. He’s tracking our deteriorating socialscape through his frequently updated photo blog, Postcards from the End of America.

jeudi, 03 décembre 2015

Žižek: Fortress Europe’s staunch defender on the left

by Esben Bogh Sorensen

Ex: http://www.roarmag.org and http://www.attackthesystem.com

(Redaction: This piece here is very critical and refuses to accept Zizek's new arguments for a renewed Left movement that would have abandoned the crazy utopian bias of the dominant establishment, partially belonging to the historical Left in Europe, that has been unable to smash the neoliberal leprosy. Therefore a careful reading of this piece can be interesting to help transform the Left into a new active solidarist movement, saving the socialist/social-democratic/chrsitian democratic or Third Way Welfare State and trade union movements from the final decay toward which the established are rushing to. In a nutshell: Zizek is right, Poor Sorensen is wrong but by being wrong he demonstrates that Zizek is right!)

Žižek’s thoughts on the refugee crisis are useless, even harmful, for creating a pan-European leftist movement capable of challenging the far-right.

In a recent article Žižek replied to the critique of a previous text he wrote on the so-called ‘refugee crisis.’ The exchange between Žižek and his critics essentially revolved around whether the left should support the refugees and migrants’ demands for open borders and the right to live where they choose, or not.

Žižek claimed that the refugees’ dream, represented by “Norway,” doesn’t exist, whereas one critic points out that it is our duty to create it. Particularly problematic is his use of phrases like “our way of life,” “Western values” and figures like “the typical left-liberal.” The most important thing that is missing in Žižek’s text is an analysis of the potentiality of the refugees and migrants’ struggles.

In his response to the criticism, Žižek begins by complaining about the shift from what he calls “radical emancipatory movements” like Syriza and Podemos to “the ‘humanitarian’ topic of the refugees.” This, we are informed, is not a good thing because the refugee and migrant struggles are actually nothing but “the liberal-cultural topic of tolerance” replacing the more genuine “class struggle.”

Why this is the case is left unclear. Rather, we are told that:

[t]he more Western Europe will be open to [immigrants], the more it will be made to feel guilty that it did not accept even more of them. There will never be enough of them. And with those who are here, the more tolerance one displays towards their way of life, the more one will be made guilty for not practicing enough tolerance.

There are several problems in this statement, especially the idea of a “we” of “Western Europe” contrasted against an image of a “way of life” somehow shared by all refugees and migrants. Before turning to that problem, however, it is useful to examine one of Žižek’s favorite tropes — the “typical left-liberal” — which sits at the heart of his critique.

Žižek’s “typical left-liberal” — a figure that is reiterated and criticized throughout much of his writing — is a figure who holds tolerant and multicultural views, but whose antiracism is actually a kind of subtle racism. In the piece in question the “left-liberal” humanist figure is a person who is afraid of criticizing Islam and who (according to Žižek) unjustly accuses those who do so of being Islamophobic.

But who is this “left-liberal” Žižek has spent so much time criticizing? On closer inspection this figure does not actually represent any position on the left. The left does not face a problem of too much tolerance, this is a straw man. If anything, it faces the twin problems of nationalism (or a national imaginary) and an inability to adequately critique Western values — problems which Žižek’s text demonstrate.

Žižek’s critique therefore completely misses the heart of the discussion: how to thoughtfully criticize fundamentalist religious views as well as “the West” and “Western values.” Žižek does neither of these.

Žižek places this misrepresented figure of the “left-liberal” on the one side, while countering in with an even more problematic and essentially racist stereotyped figure of the refugee/migrant:

Many of the refugees want to have a cake and eat it: They basically expect the best of the Western welfare-state while retaining their specific way of life, though in some of its key features their way of life is incompatible with the ideological foundations of the Western welfare-state.

Now, compare this to a recent statement made by Marine Le Pen, the leader of the French Front National:

“Without a policy restricting immigration, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to fight against communalism and the rise of ways of life at odds with … values of the French Republic.”

Žižek’s sentiments are remarkably similar to the rhetoric of the European far-right. Representatives of Front National, the Danish Peoples Party or UKIP couldn’t have been more precise on the fundamental views of nationalism within Europe today. Žižek completely capitulates to this nationalism, showing the dangers of utilizing the language of your enemy.

Essentially, Žižek accepts the dominant idea — shared by institutional Europe and the extreme right — that refugees and migrants pose a problem, threat, or some kind of crisis for “us” and “our egalitarianism and personal freedoms.” In doing so he reiterates a common nationalist argument, which can be found both in an institutional form promoted by national governments and in a radical right form: they and their way of life are incompatible with “us” and “our way of life.”

The problem here is not the degree of tolerance or exclusion as Žižek suggests, but rather the opposition itself, which is intrinsically false. In his critique of the (mis)figure of the humanist “left-liberal,” Žižek falls back on the illusion of a totalizing European or Western “we.” A “we” that is superior to the “way of life” of refugees and migrants, because “our” values are universal.

Naturally, this poses a problem, or rather a “refugee crisis” that “we” need to solve. Instead of criticizing this “we,” Žižek reproduces the mainstream media’s image of refugees as a kind of impersonal stream of humans posing nothing but a problem or even a crisis. This, Žižek says, calls for “militarization,” a topic he (fortunately?) doesn’t elaborate on any further.

In the text, all refugees and migrants are defined by the same way of life. However — in risk of stating the obvious — the refugees and migrants come from very different geographical areas and very different cultures. The homogeneity suggested by Žižek clearly draws on an old orientalist trope, where different non-homogenous cultures are categorized within the one culture with opposite and conflicting values to Europe and the West. Gone are not only different cultures, traditions etc., but also variations within these, as well as the myriad forms of secular, liberal, and socialist traditions that have also existed in parts of the vast geographical area that Žižek simply subsumes under a single way of life, sure to create a “crisis” when coming to Europe.

The European figure of the “we” that must solve the “crisis” created by the refugees is of course problematic, but even more problematic is Žižek’s proposed solution to this supposed crisis.

His proposed starting point of action is not, for example, a movement that brings together both migrants and different sectors of European proletarians like precarious workers, the unemployed, students etc., but rather the European nation-states and their political elites.

Rather than fighting together for freedom of movement for all, Žižek thinks the national and supranational elites should curb this right. Rather than fighting for open borders and against the nation-states and their political elites, he supports a centralized distribution of refugees by the nation-states. Rather than analyzing the current conjuncture and the possibilities for contesting the institutions of European political and economic elites — Fortress Europe — Žižek falls back on the same institutional solutions and becomes the “left defender” of Fortress Europe.

Moreover, instead of situating the struggles of refugees and migrants within an analysis of capitalism, Žižek refers abstractly to the problems caused by “the integration of local agriculture into global economy.” Žižek’s avoidance of political economy is not new, but it becomes particularly problematic in this case because it’s not coupled with an analysis of the current social struggles throughout Europe and beyond, resulting in a strange opposition between abstract “class struggle” and the struggles of refugees and migrants.

There is no serious attempt to analyze the potentialities of these struggles and how their articulation to other social struggles could potentially challenge the extreme right.

Rather than try to answer such questions, Žižek suggests that the “left must embrace its radical Western roots.” Unfortunately, Žižek uncritically adopts the concept of “Western values” which seem to imply “universal values.”

But what are “western values” and the European cultural heritage if not a deeply bourgeois heritage? A heritage with a history full of mass killings, mass extermination, war, colonialism, and imperialism etc.? This history of western values is not just the past but also the present. The so-called war on terror has cost 1.3 million civilian lives.

It is not refugees and migrants who have created any crisis. Instead, it is Europe, the West and global capital with its self-claimed universal values that pose a fundamental threat to humanity in general. What are western values if not “freedom, equality, property, and Bentham,” as Marx once said?

Žižek criticizes the left for wanting to “fill in the gap of the missing radical proletarians by importing them from abroad, so that we will get the revolution by means of an imported revolutionary agent.” Like the figure of the “left-liberal,” this notion seems to be pulled out of thin air.

It would be far more interesting if Žižek actually participated in the discussion on how to connect migrant and refugee struggles with other kinds of struggles. Instead we get a critique of these unsubstantiated figures of positions on the left. Who is Žižek actually criticizing?

In the last couple of months, we have witnessed how migrant and refugee struggles in Calais, Greece, Hungary, Slovenia, Germany, and even Denmark have sparked a new antiracist movement that could potentially challenge the growing extreme right. This is a movement that overcomes the national “we” and contains networks of solidarity between different sectors of migrants, refugees, and the European population.

How these struggles can be combined with other kinds of struggles is of crucial importance. Yet Žižek manages to reduce this potentiality to “the liberal-cultural topic of tolerance.” Žižek’s last two texts are completely useless for creating an anti-capitalist and anti-national movement across Europe capable of challenging the radical right and European elites; indeed, they have been harmful for such a project.

Esben Bøgh Sørensen is an intellectual historian from Denmark with a Master’s degree in History of Ideas. He has been engaged in various social movements, most recently the student movement and the refugee solidarity movement. You can find his writings on academia.edu.

jeudi, 13 août 2015

The destruction of civil society by the Left

Bruce G. Charlton

Ex: http://charltonteaching.blogspot.ca

Professor Bruce G Charlton. My latest book is now available online: addictedtodistraction.blogspot.co.uk . Comments are moderated pretty harshly - e.g. I don't publish comments that badmouth me or subvert the blog post (after all, what would be the point of *that*?). Readers are welcome to email me at brucedot charltonat outlookdotcom

Going back to the early 1990s, there emerged a considerable literature and a political movement concerned with Civil Society - which was the layer of organized social life between the government and the family: churches, professions and guilds, charities and clubs and the like.

This movement came in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union and most of its satellites and colonies in 1989, and the break up of that empire into 'democratic' nations. The idea was that totalitarianism had been characterized by the destruction of civil society (either annihilation - as with many Christian churches, or take over by the state).

By contrast, civil society was seen as a vital characteristic of a healthy and free society - the idea that Men should have forms of organization that were substantially autonomous was seen as both efficient and also morally necessary.

The idea was that civil societies should be encouraged in the emerging nations of central and Eastern Europe - and indeed elsewhere - so that they might become Free as the West was Free.

What we have seen instead has been the near-complete destruction of civil society in the West - and the process has been all but un-remarked and un-noted as a general phenomenon. Almost all forms of human association have been brought under control of the state, most are irrelevant, participation in civil society is very low and feeble, many churches, professions social hobby groups been severely weakened or become extinct.

By the criteria of 25 years ago, objectively this means The West is not free, and is instead totalitarian.

It happened by a different mechanism than under Soviet Communism - which used direct suppression, making institutions illegal, confiscating their assets. imprisoning their leaders etc. In the West the imposition of totalitarianism was a mixture of subsidy-control and strangulation by regulation.

But if its implementation has been far more successful and complete; the motivation in the West was exactly the same as it was in the USSR - the motivation of Leftist totalitarianism - that there should be one ideology, and that ideology should be imposed by the state.

But of course the modern New Leftist, politically correct ideology is a very different beast than the utopian Socialism of a century ago. Both are destructive of good - destructive of marriage, the family, churches, professions, guilds, self-education, self-organization... all forms of voluntary autonomous cooperation...

But the Soviets wanted to harness the liberated resources and energies to build utopia; whereas the modern Social Justice Warriors have no utopia in mind - they simply want to destroy that which they oppose. And they have succeeded.

At first social institutions are indeed co-opted to the New Left project, usually by subsidies in return for conformity - but sooner or later the external takeover will destroy the institution, because once made-over to fit in with regulations over membership, politically correct objectives, and working in an environment increasingly onerous in terms of regulations and restrictions - the organization all-but loses its proper function, and instead operate merely as a branch of the state civil administration, just another organization dedicated in its essence to inclusion, equality, diversity...

So clubs are closed, churches and charities dwindle or disappear, organized group hobbies are abandoned - the population uses its leisure simply on being entertained, drinking, eating, plugging into the mass media.

The population are atomized, demoralized, demotivated, unable to think or act for themselves. Which is just how Leftism want them to be: because when there is no organization with autonomy - there is no threat.

lundi, 01 juin 2015

Political Syncretism: Where Radical Left Meets Traditional RightJoaquin Flores is an American expat living in Belgrade. He is a full-time analyst at the Center for Syncretic Studies, a public geostrategic think-tank, where his work centers on Eastern European, Eurasian, and Middle East affairs. Flores is particularly adept at analyzing the psychology of the propaganda wars and cutting through the noise of 'information overload.' He also serves as the Europe-wide coordinator for New Resistance, a US based revolutionary movement. In the first hour, Joaquin explains the impetus for the founding of the Center for Syncretic Studies, formed in 2013 as platform from which to view the various social and ideological movements that exist today with a broad lens. We discuss the commonality between the radical and progressive left and the radical and paleo-conservative right, which hold the same values and also see the same things wrong with society. Then, Joaquin breaks down the divide and conquer tactics of our leaders, the dictatorship that exists within the US, and the importance of waking up to the delusion that there will be a government reform. In the second hour we consider what it is that can be done by the people in the USA to overcome the dilemmas of Government. Joaquin gives some insight into commonly held criticisms of the Powers That Be, the US’s misinterpretation of revolutions around the globe, and the importance of getting past the idea that the mainstream view is the majority. Then, we examine the propaganda surrounding multiculturalism and the deracination that is occurring within European cultures. Later, Joaquin talks about the media war that is occurring within the Ukraine and Russia, Operation: Gladio, and the New Inter Nationalists. Further, we deliberate the Ukrainian Civil War, US involvement with Pravy Sektor Coup, the push for a Ukrainian failed state, and the role of Islam in this artificially created social movement. In conclusion, Joaquin describes how The New Media is the primary weapon in 4th generation warfare.